Interoperability issue between IPv4 and IPv6 in OpenFlow enabled network: IPv4 and IPv6 transaction flow traffic

In recent years the usage of the Internet and the hosting of virtual machines in a data center have been increasing in a dramatic manner which leads to IPv4 address depletion issue. Consequently, the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 has become inevitable and fairly urgent. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is one of the recently emerging networking paradigm which separate the control and data plane logic into SDN controller and switch respectively. OpenFlow is the protocol, which is used to establish the communication between the controller and switch. However, the communication between IPv4 and IPv6 hosts is still a challenging issue, due to the inherent limitation of IPv6 support in various versions of OpenFlow Protocols. Hence, in this research paper, we studied the interoperability issues between IPv4 and IPv6 communication in an SDN enabled environment. We explored the dual-stack and tunneling mechanisms to resolve the interoperability and OpenFlow versioning support issues. The experiments were carried out by enabling the switches in OpenFlow 1.0 and OpenFlow 1.3 modes. The real-time and simulation results reported in this paper indicated that the interoperability issues between IPv4 and IPv6 can be solved using dual-stack and tunneling techniques.