I expect significant growth in my new network build for new customers

This case reviews a deployment example where service providers need to address significant growth segments and have made a strategic choice to deploy IPv6.

In this case, a new IPv6 infrastructure (at least in the access portion of the network) is built to handle the customers being added, and these customers will be issued IPv6-ready CPE devices.

DS Lite fits well into this scenario where CPE is provisioned with IPv6. The anticipated IPv6 traffic will be carried natively over the new infrastructure, and the IPv4 traffic will be transported over IPv6 tunnels to the CGNAT device. At the CGNAT, a single level of NAT is performed to translate private IPv4 to public IPv4 addresses. At the same time, the existing IPv4 customer base can continue to operate on the IPv4 network.

The previous figure depicts a DS Lite deployment, where the access infrastructure is IPv6-enabled. An Address family Transition Router (AFTR) function is deployed in the core to decapsulate the IPv4 traffic carried over the IPv6 tunnels, and to NAT those packets before delivery to the IPv4 Internet.

DS Llite can also be deployed where the access network is layer 2 (this is common in Broadband Remote Access server scenarios); in this case, the provider application edge router can serve as the IPv6 tunnel endpoint.

The beauty of DS Lite is that it decouples the deployment of IPv6 in the access and edge from the deployment of IPv6 on end user applications. The end user IPv4 applications can continue to work seamlessly with nAT44 on the CGNAT device in the provider infrastructure. IPv6 content can be natively accessed through an IPv6 cloud where available.

Another advantage of the DS Lite architecture is that all endpoints are assigned unique, global IPv6 addresses, thereby simplifying the management and administration of the network.

To know more about the tools that support this scenario download the paper:
Tools and Strategies for Coping With IPv4 Address Depletion [ 1 MB ]