UPnP IPv4/IPv6 bridge for home networking environment

The purposes of universal plug and play (UPnP) are to allow consumer electronics, intelligent appliances (IA) and mobile devices from different vendors to be Internet connected seamlessly and installed easily at home. Also, as the IPv6 environment becomes inevitable, IPv6 ready IA are more and more popular. However, the fact is that IPv4 UPnP control points cannot communicate with IPv6 UPnP devices or vice versa. In this paper, we proposed an UPnP IPv4/IPv6 bridge for control points and devices can interoperate between IPv4 and IPv6 protocols; that is, they can communicate with each other although some of them support only IPv4 and others support IPv6.