IPV4 to IPV6 deployment, transition mechanisms and issues

The Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is a very well established protocol, which has been in use in networks for a vast number of years. IPv6 has been developed as a long-term solution for IPv4 address drain problem. This paper discusses issues about the integration and co-existence of the two protocols and the transition mechanisms when deploying IPv6. Currently IPv4 is the dominant protocol within world networking infrastructures, which means the realistic solution for the transition is to utilize the legacy network and keep the complexity and cost to the minimum. Tunnelling approach offers great advantage over translation and dual stack approaches. Currently the manual tunnelling and 6-to-4 tunnelling have been two favourable techniques, of which the performance will be evaluated in this paper, using a wide area network that is modelled by a popular simulation platform. The statistical results demonstrate the effectiveness of these two techniques.