Performance Analysis of an Efficient Network Transition Mechanism Supporting Mobile IPv6

IPv6 will replace IPv4 as the widely used protocol in the Internet because this protocol can solve the inherent problems in IPv4, i.e., large address space, better mobility support, easier security integration than IPv4. Since a huge number of sub-networks are already installed using IPv4, the transition phase where IPv4 and IPv6 coexistence is inevitable. There are many transition mechanisms to support communication between incompatible nodes in this situation. However, they scarcely ever consider mobility of the nodes. When a mobile IPv6 node wishes to communicate with an IPv4 node, they can communicate through MIPv6 and any translation mechanism.However, the communication is inefficient because of tunneling and reverse tunneling via a home agent. To support efficient routing, we propose a simple efficient transition mechanism extending NAT-PT, which adds functions to be able to handle packets for communications on behalf of the home agent. Implementation results indicate that the proposed mechanism extending NAT-PT, named NAT-PTm, provides more efficient mobility than NAT-PT in the mobile environment.