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Abstract: Although there appears to have been increased interest in routing IPv6 over the public Internet since mid 2007, the adoption and deployment of IPv6 has been relatively limited. This paper investigates the reasons for the slow rate of progress, as well as the debate surrounding the demand for IPv6 technology. The issues relating to IPv4-to-IPv6 migration will be re-addressed, from where respective solutions will be proposed along with decision-making guidelines. This article does not focus on IPv6's contribution to wireless and mobile networks; attention is placed on its deployment in the Internet backbone and enterprise networks. The findings aim to evaluate the needs and requirements of IPv6 in order to ascertain the extent to which it can be made common place.
Keywords: IPv4 to IPv6 Transition, IPv6 Deployment, Migration Strategy
1. Introduction
IPv6 was first invented by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the mid 1990s due to the then urgent need to supplement the rapidly diminishing IPv4 addressing space. It was thought that IPv4 would be totally exhausted therefore a successor was designed. With the majority of networks still utilizing IPv4, there are currently no serious motivational factors to move over to a new method of working when the current provision is still adequate for the majority of users. The debate has been ongoing for years in terms of whether IPv6 should be deployed [1], [2], hence very few migration plans have been made in the industry [3].
The use of IPv4 has changed dramatically over the last 30 years, and the protocol was never designed to deal with the stress and strains it has to endure over the last few years. The initial design specification did not take into account the need for the protocol to handle video-on-demand services, or other types of large scale data, also with the advent of mobile communications, set top boxes that have Internet access taking presence in the home, each device requires an IP address.
However, the need for a new technology is not paramount; the current 30-year-old technology has been modified to coincide with new ideas and ways of working. For a sustainable network to be developed and evolve over the next few years a seamless migration over to IPv6 needs to be...