On Exploiting Sdn To Facilitate Ipv4/Ipv6 Coexistence And Transition

Today, the booming of the IoT (Internet of things) makes the volume of IP network devices grow rapidly, and IPv4 address pool was exhausted. While IPv6 is considered to be a feasible solution due to its sufficient address space, the slow deployment of IPv6 makes the necessity of the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. This paper proposes a framework for IPv4/IPv6 co-existence by leveraging Software-Defined Network (SDN) to facilitate the IPv6-to-IPv4 address conversion. In particular, a virtual machine with 6to4NAT functionality is generated dynamically when IPv6 traffic appears in IPv4 island. With the aid of SDN and virtualization on NAT64 nodes, the load balancing of IPv6-to-IPv4 traffic is facilitated. We implement this platform by using OpenStack in a real network testbed, and show that the proposed solution is a more flexible deployment architecture.