Advanced Internet Protocols, Services, and Applications

11

IP VERSION 6

Demand for Internet connectivity is growing quickly. At present, 1.5 billion users access the Internet World Stats [1], with tremendous growth in both the developed world and, especially, in the developing world. This growth is expected to continue. In particular the increasingly popular use of data services in mobile telephony networks has the potential to triple the number of Internet users within the foreseeable future [2, 3]. Machine-to-machine communications are expected to further contribute to the growth [4]. These developments are causing a rapid increase in the number of devices that should be addressable on the Internet.

Unfortunately, the growing demand for addresses is exceedingly difficult to meet with Internet Protocol (IP) version 4 (IPv4). Projections show that by the year of 2012 the pool of unallocated global IPv4 addresses will be exhausted [5]. Given the ceasing supply of IPv4 addresses for new devices, what can be done to enable future growth of the Internet? There are two options:

1. Share existing IPv4 addresses across multiple devices.
2. Introduce additional IP addresses.

Sharing IPv4 addresses has been pursued for a long time by means of IPv4 address translation [6], also known as network address translation. IPv4 would have already run out of addresses if IPv4 address translators had not become ubiquitous. Introducing additional IP addresses, is the main objective of IP version 6 (IPv6). Unfortunately, even though the deployment of IPv6 will ...