A Novel IPv4/IPv6 Transition Mechanism Which Supports Transparent Connections

Currently, the Internet consists of native IPv4 (IPv4-only), native IPv6, and IPv4/IPv6 dual networks. Unfortunately, IPv4 and IPv6 are incompatible protocols. When both IP versions are available and the users of Internet want to connect without any restrictions, a transition mechanism is required. During the time of migration from IPv4 to IPv6 networks, a number of transition mechanisms have been proposed by IETF to ensure smooth, stepwise and independent changeover. The authors propose a new flexible transition scheme, which is called BDIPS (Bi-Directional Intelligent Processing System) that deals with the address mapping transition IPv4 to IPv6 and vice versa depending on an understanding of the two network environments and converting the received datagram to the destination environment.