Forming an IPv6-only Core for Today’s Internet

Routing complexity of the core network is crucial to Internet scalability. IPv6 is believed to have better performance in multihoming than conventional IPv4. With the depolyment of native IPv6 backbone networks, a new door is opened to a better Internet, empowered by the combination of a well-aggregated IPv6-only core and the fertile application resources which still remain in IPv4 networks. To achieve this ideal, we propose a prefix-specific address mapping to realize a scenario in which an IPv6 globally routable prefix plays the role of a locator, while IPv4 host address is used as an identifier. To overcome the challenge of identifier/locator mapping lookups, we designed a distributed indexing service system that is self-organized. According to the numerical analysis based on global IPv4 and IPv6 route tables, customers multi-homed to 3 providers via IPv6 can get path diversity higher than those connected to however many providers via IPv4.