AFTR the Fire: Carrier Networks and Incremental Deployment of IPv6

Google Tech Talk January 21, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Paul Selkirk, Senior Software Engineer, Internet Systems Consortium. With the impending end of the unallocated pool of IPv4 addresses, the Internet faces a problem: there will be no more unused IPv4 space to assign as networks grow, only IPv6. Growth of the network in the future depends on effective deployment of IPv6. But migration of the existing Internet-- end user systems, content sources, enterprise networks, carrier infrastructure-- to IPv6 is only happening slowly and irregularly. The technology originally intended to support incremental deployment of IPv6, "dual-stack," in which individual end systems are capable of using both IPv4 and IPv6, is not turning out to be practical on the universal scale it was designed for. Several technologies are under development and early deployment to bridge the gap between the IPv4 internet and one that can interoperate between IPv4 and IPv6 in the interim-- perhaps lengthy-- before IPv6 is "mainstream" globally. This talk will briefly lay out the operational constraints around IPv4/IPv6 co-existence, and then describe ISC's implementation of one particular protocol, DS-lite ("Dual-stack lite"). A new product, AFTR (for "Address Family Transition Router"), implements the DS-lite protocol and provides the core of a deployable architecture for IPv4/IPv6 co-existence in carrier networks.