Toward IPv4 to IPv6 Migration within a Campus Network
The evolution of the Internet has effectively exhausted all unique addresses offered by the current IPv4 protocol. Hence, IPv6 has been developed in response to the predicted long-term demand for addresses by Internet users. This new IP version has a 128-bit address length, which is four times that of IPv4. As the two protocols have different formats and behaviors, efforts are needed to ensure they can directly communicate with each other. Some transition mechanisms have been proposed by IETF to enable IPv4 and IPv6 networks to coexist until the whole Internet is based on an IPv6 network.