Migrating to Ipv6 — The role of basic coordination

Abstract

The need for a larger Internet address space was acknowledged early on, and a solution (IPv6) standardized years ago. Its adoption has, however, been anything but easy and still faces significant challenges. The situation begs the questions of "why has it been so difficult?" and "what could have been (or still be) done to facilitate this migration?" There has been significant recent interest in those questions, and the paper builds on a line of work based on technology adoption models to explore them. The results confirm the impact of several known factors, but also provide new insight. In particular, they highlight the destabilizing effect of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offering competing alternatives (to IPv6), and demonstrate the benefits of even minimum coordination among them in offering IPv6 as an option. The findings afford additional visibility into what affects technology transition in large systems with complex dependencies such as the Internet.

Maintaining the progress of IPv6 adoption

“…We choose the parameters of the Kumaraswamy function randomly, as long as it yields to a uni-modal distribution function for σ 6 . Therefore, the above test captures a wide range of functions that take values in [0,1], and shows that the findings are not qualitatively affected by the choice of this function.…”

“…Except for the fact that the optimal price for public IPv4 always satisfies p 4 = 1 (actually just below 1 to ensure positive utility), the expression for an explicit solution for Eq. (10) sheds little light on the role of different parameters, the reader is referred to [24] for details, and we instead rely on numerical examples to explore the range of outcomes. The next section discusses the results of numerical analyses of the models.…”

“…The author would like to acknowledge Dr. Guérin's contributions to the preliminary version of this paper (presented at IFIP Networking 2014 Conference [1]).…”

“…There are too many differences between this paper and its preliminary version [1], and therefore, we only list the major changes, namely, generalized models, extended range of numerical analyses, and robustness analyses section.…”

Migrating the Internet to IPv6: An Exploration of the When and Why

“…Performance issues in OSes have been explored in [34], [49], while investigations aimed at end-to-end performance have compared IPv4 and IPv6 using metrics such as path delay and packet loss [47], [50]. On the modeling front, many studies have sought to formulate the IPv6 adoption question in the context of an economic framework, in an attempt to capture the many interacting factors affecting it [14], [18], [35], [42].…”