Automated allocation and configuration of dual stack IP networks

The manual configuration and management of a modern network infrastructure is an increasingly complex task. This complexity is caused by factors including heterogeneity, a high degree of change and dependencies between configuration parameters. Due to increasing complexity, manual configuration has become time consuming and error prone. This paper proposes an automatic configuration tool for dual stack IP networks that addresses these issues by using high level abstractions to model the network topology and key parameters. From this high level configuration model, low level configuration files can be generated and deployed. A key parameter specified in the high level model is the network prefix of the entire network. When translating a configuration model to configuration files, IPv4 and IPv6 subnets need to be allocated. We provide an allocation algorithm to do this allocation in the most efficient way. Evaluation of our approach shows that there is a significant increase in efficiency compared to manual configuration.

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