Global Mobile IPv6 Addressing Using Transition Mechanisms

The adoption of the Internet Protocol in mobile and wireless technologies has considerably increased the number of hosts that can potentially access the global Internet. IPv6 is considered the long term solution for the IPv4 address shortage problem, but the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is supposed to be very gradual. Therefore, there will be a long time during which both protocol versions will coexist. To facilitate transition, the IETF has set up a work group called NGTRANS (Next Generation TRANSition) which specifies mechanisms for supporting interoperability between IPv4 and IPv6. This paper describes a new approach for implementing mobile networks with global Internet connectivity using transition mechanisms. It consists in virtually assigning IPv6 addresses to IPv4 hosts without modifying end-user devices by introducing a transparent gateway in the mobile network. The mobile hosts with virtual IPv6 addresses are uniquely addressed through the global IPv4 Internet by using IPv6 addresses from the standard 6to4 addressing scheme or Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDN). This “extended” transition mechanism permits to deploy mobile networks with global Internet connectivity without requiring public IPv4 addresses, using legacy IPv4 user devices. The mobile hosts with virtual IPv6 addresses can communicate to other hosts with virtual IPv6 addresses or with “true” IPv6