6PE Study And Implementation In The Transition Of IPv4 To IPv6

With rapid development of Internet in the world, the lack of Ipv4 address has become the bottleneck of the advancement of network and communications industry. IPv6 has the unexampled advantage over IPv4 on IP address number, security, mobility, QoS, etc. Therefore, the transitions from IPv4 to Ipv6 will be an inevitable trend in NGN network. MPLS is a hot topic in recent years, MPLS can be used to implement traffic engineering and QoS in the public backbone network, and MPLS can also bring out many kinds of flexible services. In this background, the technology of MPLS 6PE emerges as the times requires. MPLS 6PE is a technology based on MPLS, which can provide the tunnel for IPv6 in the IPv4 could.MPLS 6PE will play a very important role in the transitions from IPv4 to IPv6. However, for the present, the application and study for MPLS 6PE technology are very little in China, and ASIC chips have not enough ability to forward MPLS packet. Considering this situation, in this paper, we put forward that network process is used to forward MPLS 6PE packet and extend features for business. As an example, we design and implement the control layer and forwarding layer of MPLS 6PE in the network devices. By the analysis of the theory and the validation of practice, we conclude that the IPv6 data packet can be fast forwarded successfully in the tunnel by using network processor. Furthermore, stability and performance of network devices based on network processor are far better than theirs based on X86 CPU. At the same time, MPLS 6PE implemented by using network processor has the unexampled advantage over ASIC on flexibility and extensibility.