IPv6 Transition: Does There Have to Be One?

1
IPv6 Transition Does There Have to Be One?

• Mark Williams
• miw_at_nortelnetworks.com
• February, 2003

2
Examples of Previous Transitions

• DECnet,IPX,SNA -gt IPv4
• original driver was FTP and file search.
• Still going on
• Not really a transition so much as a greenfield
  rebuild
• Highly Successful
• IPv4 -gt OSI
• driver was government policy
• not really a transition so much as a failure

3
IPv6 Transition/Upgrade

• Driver is address space exhaustion and
  concomitant loss of end-end tranparency
• There is no application for IPv6 that could not
  be done equally well with IPv4 if there was
  enough address space and transparency could be
  preserved.
• No Killer App other than scalability.
• Is this enough of a driver to make it happen?
• Most people who care about networks would say
  yes.
• Most users of commodity Internet dont care about
  transparency.

4
The Translation Conundrum

• Protocol Translation inside the network (as
  opposed to on hosts) introduces the same loss of
  transparency as Address Translation introduces
  today.
• Any transition strategy (e.g. NAT-PT, Transport
  Relay Translator, etc.) that involves loss of
  transparency for the next 10 years is unlikely to
  find favour with either the commodity users or
  those who care about networking.
• not enough to get them to spend money anyway.
• Translation gateways introduce security issues as
  well as loss of transparency.
• this is not to say that non-translational
  transition mechanisms dont have security issues
  as well, but why introduce yet more?

5
Dont Transition. Dont translate. Co-exist

• Run IPv4 and IPv6 side by side and on dual stack
  infrastructure for the forseeable future.
• biggest issue routing table size.
• Assumption is that IPv6-only hosts will be rare
  outside of the wireless handset world.
• dont uninstall IPv4 just because IPv6 is
  activated.
• Interconnect islands of IPv6 and connect isolated
  users using non-translation methods. (e.g. 6to4,
  tunnel brokers)
• Where absolutely necessary (e.g. for wireless
  handsets) use application level gateways to gain
  access to content from IPv6 world.
• deprecated. If you want your content to be
  available to IPv6 users you should put an IPv6
  stack on your server and see point 2.
• This will be the responsibility of the relevant
  service providers.

6
(No Transcript)