The evolution from IPv4 to IPv6 faces many technical challenges

There are many solutions for IPv4 evolution to IPv6. All of these follow the following principles:

First, the evolution process should be smooth and secure without affecting the user experience as much as possible.

Second, backbone networks, website businesses, and access terminals must participate in the upgrade and transformation to jointly promote the commercial deployment of IPv6. In mainstream solutions, the 6RD scheme relies on the existing IPv4 backbone network and does not use the network to migrate to IPv6 as a whole. At the same time, there is a lack of foresight, resulting in a large waste of investment in the early stage; DS-Lite takes the IPv6 backbone network as the core. This solution is too radical and has high technical risks.

It is generally considered that the incremental evolution scheme combining the dual stack and DNS64/NAT64 is a relatively safe solution. This solution not only ensures that existing IPv4 services are not affected, but also provides a platform for emerging IPv6 services, ensuring smooth evolution.

Under this solution, the evolution process is divided into three phases: the first phase of Dual-protocol stack operation, the second stage of development of pure IPv6 users and IPv6/IPv4 interconnection, in the third stage, IPv4 users are reduced to transition to a pure IPv6 network.

The incremental evolution solution that combines the dual-stack and DNS64/NAT64 modes still needs to address many technical challenges.

First, during website upgrade, as the party that provides Internet resources and content, website upgrade is crucial to attract end users to access IPv6 networks. Website upgrades involve server systems and application software, which are relatively complex and require protective transformation of existing IPv4 resources. Meanwhile, the newly purchased equipment and software are deployed in the pure IPv6 mode.

After the dual-stack network is built, IPv6 and IPv4 networks need to be interconnected. Only IPv6 terminals need to be able to access the unupgraded IPv4 service, and the traffic between IPv6 and IPv4 must be smoothly converted. The implementation of IPv6/IPv4 interconnection and the increase of IPv6 users, this will further promote the migration of more websites to IPv6. In this case, in order to better provide quality IPv6 services for users in different regions, the website must be deployed on multiple sites in different regions to improve fault tolerance and availability, which requires global load balancing and link load balancing capabilities.