Migrating to IPv6: The Problem of the Applications

Abstract

After several years of studies and experiments, the day of the new IP, identified as version 6, are coming; the growing pressure is mostly due to address shortage (especially in Far East countries), the imminent introduction of new 3G mobile devices, and routing scalability problems. While most of the modern operating systems and network devices (routers) are already IPv6-capable, one of the biggest problems is related to the huge amount of work involving application migration. This paper studies some issues related to the migration of applications to IPv6: (i) how difficult the porting is and (ii) how to make an application IPv6-compatible when its source code is not available. This paper presents solutions to the latter problem that “retrofit” off-the-shelf server applications. Such solutions can also be deployed in response to the pressing demand to promptly make native IPv6 service available to IPv6-enabled clients.