Application compatibility of the NAT64 IPv6 transition technology

The proliferation of smart phones and other Internet capable devices together with the depletion of the global IPv4 address pool will be a huge driving force for the deployment of IPv6 in the forthcoming years. The communication of an IPv6 only client with an IPv4 only server is a typical practical task to be solved among the many issues of the co-existence of IPv4 and IPv6. The usage of DNS64+NAT64 may be a good solution if our applications can flawlessly work with it. As for NAT64 implementations, TAYGA running under Linux and Packet Filter (PF) of OpenBSD were tested with the following application level protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, IMAP4, Telnet, SSH, FTP, OpenVPN, RDP, Syslog, BitTorrent, Skype and SIP. The client-server application protocols could traverse through the NAT64 gateway flawlessly but the peer to peer ones failed. In contrast to the results of other researchers, OpenVPN worked perfectly with NAT64.