Flexible Integration of Tunneling and Translation for IPv6

Abstract The IPv6 transition problem has become the most urgent and practical obstacle holding back the development of the next generation Internet. Various translation and tunneling techniques have been proposed to solve the transition problem. Tunneling satisfies the demand of IPv4-IPv6 traversing while translation achieves IPv4-IPv6 interconnection. However, translation faces several challenges including heterogeneous addressing, operation complexity and scalability issues. Although researchers have attempted to decompose and simplify these problems, little achievement has been made due to these problems being bound to the very nature of translation. In this paper we propose a novel translation spot selection approach that solves the existing issues from a new angle and hence makes effective use of translation techniques. Based on this approach, we propose a transition framework for transit and edge networks. This framework integrates tunneling and translation to support both traversing and IPv4-IPv6 interconnection, and uses them to create communication models flexibly for different demand scenarios. Moreover, we present signaling methods for both cases, to achieve automatic translation spot selection and context advertisement