A Solution to Incompatibility Between IPv6 and IPv4 Communications

Abstract

It has been about one year since last hearing anything about the Internet Protocol v10 (IPv10) proposal while this week it s now available in draft form. While IPv6 isn t widely-adopted around the globe yet, IPv10 is already in development and helps to address some of the woes of IPv6. IPv10 is designed to allow IPv6 addresses to communicate to/from IPv4 addresses. IPv10 hopes to speed the adoption to IPv6 addressing by making it more backwards compatible with IPv4 with allowing the two Internet Protocol standards to better coexist. From the draft specification: It solves the issue of allowing IPv6 only hosts to communicate to IPv4 only hosts and vice versa in a simple and very efficient way, especially when the communication is done using both direct IP addresses and when using hostnames between IPv10 hosts, as there is no need for protocol translations or getting the DNS involved in the communication process more than its normal address resolution function. IPv10 allows hosts from two IP versions (IPv4 and IPv6) to be able to communicate, and this can be accomplished by having an IPv10 packet containing a mixture of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in the same IP packet header. Keywords-IPv4; IPv6; IPv10 IPv10 is the proposed name as IPv10 = IPv4 + IPv6. The draft specification can be found at IETF.org and will expire in March 2018. I. SPECIFICATION Internet Protocol version 10 (IPv10) Draft-omar-IPv10-06 Khaled Omar Internet-Draft The Road Intended status: Standards Track Expires: March 2, 2018 September 2, 2017 A. Status of this Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsolete by other documents at any time. It is in appropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as work in progress. This Internet-Draft will expire on March 2, 2018. International Journal of Advanced Network, Monitoring and Controls Volume 04, No.04, 2019 81 B. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2017 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust s Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. This document specifies version 10 of the Internet Protocol (IPv10), sometimes referred to as IP Mixture (IPmix). IP version 10 (IPv10) is a new version of the Internet Protocol, designed to allow IP version 6 [RFC-2460] to communicate to IP version 4 (IPv4) [RFC-791] and vice versa. Internet is the global wide network used for communication between hosts connected to it. These connected hosts (PCs, servers, routers, mobile devices, etc.) must have a global unique address to be able to communicate through the Internet and these unique addresses are defined in the Internet Protocol (IP). II. THE FIRST VERSION OF THE INTERNET PROTOCOL OF IPV4. When IPv4 was developed in 1975, it was not expected that the number of connected hosts to the Internet reach a very huge number of hosts, more than the IPv4 address space; also it was aimed to be used for experimental purposes in the beginning. IPv4 is (32-bits) address that allowing approximately 4.3 billion unique IP addresses. A few years ago, with the massive increase of connected hosts to the Internet, IPv4 addresses started to run out. Three short-term solutions (CIDR, Private addressing, and NAT) were introduced in the mid-1990s but even with using these solutions, the IPv4 address space ran out in February, 2011 as announced by IANA, The announcement of depletion of the IPv4 address space by the RIRs is as follows: * April, 2011: APNIC announcement. * September, 2012: RIPE NCC announcement. * June, 2014: LACNIC announcement. * September, 2015: ARIN announcement. A long term solution (IPv6) was introduced to increase the address space used by the Internet Protocol and this was defined in the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).IPv6 was developed in 1998 by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). III. IPV6 IPv6 is (128-bits) address and can support a huge number of unique IP addresses that is approximately equals to 2^128 unique addresses. So, the need for IPv6 became a vital issue to be able to support the massive increase of connected hosts to the Internet after the IPv4 address space exhaustion. The migration from IPv4 to IPv6 became a necessary thing, but unfortunately, it would take decades for this full migration to be accomplished. 19 years have passed since IPv6 was developed, but no full migration happened till now and this would cause the Internet to be divided into two parts, as IPv4 still dominating on the Internet traffic (85% as measured by Google in April, 2017) and new Internet hosts will be assigned IPv6-only addresses and be able to communicate with 15% only of the Internet services and apps. So, the need for solutions for the IPv4 and IPv6 coexistence became an important issue in the migration process as we cannot wake up in the morning and find all IPv4 hosts are migrated to be IPv6 hosts, especially, as most enterprises have not do this migration for creating a full IPv6 implementation. International Journal of Advanced Network, Monitoring and Controls Volume 04, No.04, 2019 82 Also, the request for using IPv6 addresses in addition to the existing IPv4 addresses (IPv4/IPv6 Dual Stacks) in all enterprise networks have not achieve a large implementation that can make IPv6 the most dominated IP in the Internet as many people believe that they will not have benefits from just having a larger IP address bits and IPv4 satisfies their needs, also, not all enterprises devices support IPv6 and also many people are afraid of the service outage that can be caused due to this migration. The recent solutions for IPv4 and IPv6 coexistence are: Native dual stack (IPv4 and IPv6); Dual-stack Lite; NAT64; 464xlat; MAP. (other technologies also exist, like lw6over4; they may have more specific use cases). IPv4/IPv6 Dual Stack, allows both IPv4 and IPv6 to coexist by using both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for all hosts at the same time, but this solution does not allows IPv4 hosts to communicate to IPv6 hosts and vice versa. Also, after the depletion of the IPv4 address space, new Internet hosts will not be able to use IPv4/IPv6 A. Dual Stacks. Tunneling, allows IPv6 hosts to communicate to each other through an IPv4 network, but still does not allows IPv4 hosts to communicate to IPv6 hosts and vice versa. B. NAT-PT, It allows IPv6 hosts to communicate to IPv4 hosts with only using hostnames and getting DNS involved in the communication process, but this solution was inefficient because it does not allows communication using direct IP addresses, also the need for so much protocol translations of the source and destination IP addresses made the solution complex and not applicable that’s why it was moved to the Historic status in the RFC 2766. Also, NAT64 requires so much protocol translations and statically configured bindings, and also getting a DNS64 involved in the communication process. IV. INTERNET PROTOCOL VERSION 10 (IPV10) IPv10 is the solution presented in this Internet draft. It solves the issue of allowing IPv6 only hosts to communicate to IPv4 only hosts and vice versa in a simple and very efficient way, especially when the communication is done using both direct IP addresses and when using hostnames between IPv10 hosts, as there is no need for protocol translations or getting the DNS involved in the communication process more than its normal address resolution function. IPv10 allows hosts from two IP versions (IPv4 and IPv6) to be able to communicate, and this can be accomplished by having an IPv10 packet containing a mixture of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in the same IP packet header. From here the name of IPv10 arises, as the IP packet can contain (IPv6 + IPv4 /IPv4 + IPv6) addresses in the same layer 3 packet header. V. THE FOUR TYPES OF COMMUNICATION A. IPv10: IPv6 Host to IPv4 Host. 1) IPv10 Packet | 128-bit | 128-bit | +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-++-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ | Data| Source IPv6 Address | 0000..0 ASN MAC Destination IPv4 Address | +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-++-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Sending IPv10 host TCP/IP Configuration: IP Address: IPv6 Address Prefix Length: /length Default Gateway: IPv6 Address (Optional) DNS Addresses: IPv6/IPv4 Address 2) Example of IPv10 Operation: R1 & R2 have both IPv4/IPv6 routing enabled are as figure1. International Journal of Advanced Network, Monitoring and Controls Volume 04, No.04, 2019 83 Figure 1. IPv6 host to IPv4 host B. IPv10: IPv4 Host to IPv6 Host. 1) IPv10 Packet | 128-bit | 128-bit | +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-++-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ | Data| 000..0 ASN MAC Source IPv4 Address | Destination IPv6 Address | +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-++-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ 2) Sending IPv10 host TCP/IP Configuration: IP Address: IPv4 Address