This document provides an overview of various ways to tunnel IPv6 packets over IPv4 networks. It covers mechanisms in current use, touches on several mechanisms that are now only of historic interest, and discusses some newer tunnel mechanisms that are not widely used at the time of publication. The goal of the document is helping people with an IPv6-in-IPv4 tunneling need to select the mechanisms that may apply to them. Status of This Memo This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes. This is a contribution to the RFC Series, independently of any other RFC stream. The RFC Editor has chosen to publish this document at its discretion and makes no statement about its value for implementation or deployment. Documents approved for publication by the RFC Editor are not a candidate for any level of Internet Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741. Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7059.

This document describes an extension of the Stateless IP/ICMP Translation for IPv6 Internet Data Center Environments (SIIT-DC) architecture, which allows applications, protocols, or nodes that are incompatible with IPv6 and/or Network Address Translation to operate correctly with SIIT-DC. This is accomplished by introducing a new component called an SIIT-DC Edge Relay, which reverses the translations made by an SIIT-DC Border Relay. The application and/or node is thus provided with seemingly native IPv4 connectivity that provides end-to-end address transparency.