IPv6 Transition Test Challenges Technical Paper
Although the first RFC for IPv6 has been available for
more than six years, IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version
6) has never really reached the phase where the telecommunications
industry considered it more than an experimental protocol.
This is because the problem, exhaustion of IPv4 addresses,
had always been fixed with techniques such as Dynamic
Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and Network Address
Translation (NAT). However, this situation is changing
due to the following technical, geographical, and political
drivers.
Technical
The third generation of mobile telecommunications is
adopting IPv6 as its protocol for multimedia communications.
Geographical
Because the IPv4 address space has been allocated mainly
to North America, Asian and European countries are in
need of more addresses. Since IPv6 is capable of coding
addresses up to 128 bits, it will be able to allocate
enough addresses among all countries. It is becoming
customary to say that IPv6, with an address field of
128 bits (compared to 32 bits for IPv4), could assign
an address to every grain of sand on earth.
Political
Some countries realized that IPv6 could be a factor
in boosting new applications and helping the economy.
Japan, North Korea, and the European community have
stated directives for service providers to use IPv6
in new applications and networks.
The purpose of this paper is to review the different
test challenges that network equipment manufacturers
and Internet service providers will encounter when migrating
to IPv6.
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