IPv6 Transition Techniques for Legacy Application

As part of army´s IPv6 transition initiative there are several deployment issues that need to be solved. These include transition at several layers of the protocol stack. Army has a suite of legacy applications that currently work on IPv4 systems. Before army moves to an all IPv6 network, it will need to go through a period of transition where both IPv4 and IPv6 networks, applications will need to co-exist and interoperate. While the IETF has proposed several ways the transition can take place, we have focused our discussion on application transition. As part of this effort we choose the army´s heavily used legacy application MCS-L (maneuver control system-lite) and applied several transition technologies. We took advantage of Telcordia´s dynamic slicing tool to study the MCS-L code and made appropriate changes to make MCS-L IPv6 compatible. We tested several transition technologies such as dual stacking, application layer gateway (ALG), tunnel broker and NAT-PT with MCS-L application. Both multicast and unicast mode of communication associated with MCS-L were also tested