Survey and analysis on IPv6 transition technologies

Research and promotion of next generation Internet have drawn attention of researchers and ISPs in many countries.In China,researchers,internet service providers and the goverment are enthusiastic on the promotion and immediate deployment of IPv6 due to the imminent problem of IPv4 address exhaustion.In this paper,we focus on IPv6 transition technologies which are the foundation of IPv6 transiiton.We first summarize the technological challenges and analyse possible scenarios during the transition from IPv4 to IPv6.Then we classify transition technologies into three categories,i.e.translation,IPv6 over IPv4 tunnel and IPv4 over IPv6 tunnel,and compare different technologies in the same category to further study their features and possible application scenarios.Finally,we point out some future directions in the area of IPv6 transition.