Evaluation of prerequisites for an IPv4 to IPv6 transition

Abstract: The increase in the number of internet capable devices has starved the Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) address space. IPv6 is likely to replace IPv4 in the future because of an address space much greater than before. This thesis work focuses on how to transition from IPv4 to IPv6 for a specific network. This work includes a study of the most common transitioning techniques and an investigation of the characteristics of the network in question, Office IT-partner’s network. The main problem of the thesis is, based on the knowledge of existing transitioning techniques, to find the best fitting solution. The three best solutions were chosen for theoretical testing on the network. The solutions were tested with focus on network services, addressing, simplicity and future completion of the transition. The testing made it clear that no solution alone solves all problems, but dual stack together with translation satisfy the most requirements. The conclusion drawn from the literature study and the testing is that transitioning to IPv6 without the use of translation causes many complex problems. To successfully transition while providing IPv4 connectivity for WAN nodes, some kind of translation is almost required. A solution consisting of dual stack and Network Address Translation 64 (NAT64) was chosen because of its ability to make the transition easy and as user-friendly as possible. It could also be started right away and completed at a pace of own choice. The lack of ability to translate stateful from IPv4 to IPv6 together with the lack of availability for IPv4 nodes made up the decision of upgrading the internal network before upgrading the internet edge.