Assuring Interoperability Between Heterogeneous (Ipv4/Ipv6) Networks Without Using Protocol Translation

This paper introduces a new mechanism called AIN-PT, which stands for Assuring Interoperability between heterogeneous (IPv4/IPv6) Networks without ("minus") using Protocol Translation. The mechanism intends to make communication between two heterogeneous networks (operating on two different IP protocols) possible by tunneling IPv4 packets in IPv6 packets, instead of translating complete headers between IPv4 and IPv6. With the AIN-PT mechanism, the translation is limited to mapping addresses between IPv4 and IPv6. This mechanism can be deployed by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or any other service providers in different stages of the transition to IPv6. The performance of AIN-PT was measured on different interoperation network scenarios, and the overall performance analysis showed that AIN-PT has better performance, in comparison with current protocol translation-based techniques.