Stateless Mapping and Multiplexing of IPv4 Addresses in Migration to IPv6 Internet

IPv4 addresses will be soon exhausted while more and more users are pouring into the Internet. It is commonly understood that IPv6 is definitely necessary for connecting new users, but lack of resources in current IPv6 world discourages providers from developing their IPv6 market. Address and packet translations are considered necessary for Internet content resources migrating from IPv4 world to IPv6, but up to now there is no one translation approach scalable enough. We understand the scalability is essentially restricted by the states in routing and those in translation, and accordingly we propose a novel architecture, called IVI, where IPv6 subscriber addresses are mapped from IPv4 with a certain rule that keeps IPv6 routing table well aggregated and makes translation stateless at all. Moreover, we introduce multiplex into the mapping to accommodate the trend of IPv4 addresses being more and more precious. Analysis based on real traffic data proves that the proposed approach is feasible to be deployed by an ISP for its customer networks and the potential degradation in end-to-end performance is acceptable.