Implementing wireless networks with transition mechanisms

The deployment of wireless networks based on IPv4 is spreading quickly all over the world. However, there is a strong shortage of public IPv4 addresses. Because of this, IPv6 has recently, received a new push of development. Most of the advances related to IPv6 are concerned to the development of transition mechanisms allowing IPv6 hosts to communicate through an existing IPv4 infrastructure or yet, permitting the communication between IPv4 and IPv6 hosts. This paper addresses the issue of using private IP addresses for implementing Mobile IP in wireless networks using IPv4/IPv6 transition mechanisms. An overview of the published IPv4/IPv6 transition mechanisms is presented, then, a new mechanism, called Transparent IPv6, which combines features of existing mechanisms, is proposed. The Transparent IPv6 mechanism consists in virtually assigning IPv6 addresses to IPv4 hosts without modifying user devices. This technique could be used to permit the deployment of wireless networks without requiring public IPv4 addresses, using legacy IPv4 equipments.