THE CO-EXISTENCE OF IPV6 AND IPV4 IN THE U.S.A.pdfVIP

THE CO-EXISTENCE OF IPV6 AND IPV4 IN THE U.S.A Dr. Garry L. White, Texas State University – San Marcos, gw06@ ABSTRACT There is speculation that by the year 2010 all IPv4 Internet addresses will be used up. By then, Asia and Europe plan to be using the new IPv6 Internet addresses. The computer industry literature indicates that the U.S.A. is lagging behind with the implementation of IPv6. Although there is not a shortage with IPv4 addresses in the U.S.A., new technologies will cause such a shortage. Such technologies are mobile phones, wireless communications, voice/video transmissions, and connecting household appliances to the Internet. While IPv4 was design to handle text data, IPv6 is better suited to handle voice/video data and mobile nodes. These new technical demands will require the implementation of IPv6 in the U.S.A. However, there will still be a tendency to use IPv4 in the U.S.A., especially for web pages and e-mail. Through the use of tunneling and translation of IP addresses, IPv6 will co-exist with IPv4. Total conversion to IPv6 in the U.S.A. will be several years after 2010. Keywords: IPv6, IPv4, NAT, U.S.A., Internet Protocol INTRODUCTION – THE NEED The Internet of today is no longer just servers and PCs. There are other mobile devices such as personal digital assistants, cell phones, and automobiles [2, 13, 20]. In the past, data packets could be delayed and arrive out of sequence in transmission over hard wire. Examples are e-mail and web pages. Today real-time voice/video wireless mobile devices are appearing on the Internet. These new devices are unable to tolerate delays and out of sequence transmissions as found with e-mails and web pages. IPv6 can deal with these new devices on the Internet. These new devices have accelerated the need for more IP addresses [6, 12]. Information Technology vendors argue that IP addresses wi