IPv 6 Transition Does There Have to Be

IPv 6 Transition: Does There Have to Be One? Mark Williams miw@nortelnetworks. com February, 2003

Examples of Previous Transitions • {DECnet, IPX, SNA} -> IPv 4 – – original driver was FTP and file search. Still going on Not really a transition so much as a greenfield rebuild Highly Successful • IPv 4 -> OSI – driver was government policy – not really a transition so much as a failure Presentation Name - 1

IPv 6 Transition/Upgrade • Driver is address space exhaustion and concomitant loss of end-end tranparency – There is no application for IPv 6 that could not be done equally well with IPv 4 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 don’t care about transparency. Presentation Name - 2

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 don’t have security issues as well, but why introduce yet more? Presentation Name - 3

Don’t Transition. Don’t translate. Co-exist • Run IPv 4 and IPv 6 side by side and on dual stack infrastructure for the forseeable future. – biggest issue: routing table size. • Assumption is that IPv 6 -only hosts will be rare outside of the wireless handset world. – don’t uninstall IPv 4 just because IPv 6 is activated. • Interconnect islands of IPv 6 and connect isolated users using non-translation methods. (e. g. 6 to 4, tunnel brokers) • Where absolutely necessary (e. g. for wireless handsets) use application level gateways to gain access to content from IPv 6 world. – deprecated. If you want your content to be available to IPv 6 users you should put an IPv 6 stack on your server and see point 2. – This will be the responsibility of the relevant service providers. Presentation Name - 4