IPv4/IPv6 forwarding control architecture in distributed router

The Internet Protocol (IP) has been the foundation of the Internet. As the Internet has grown, IPv4 was inadequate to meet the performance and functional requirements for the Internet. In response to these needs, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) issued a new protocol, known as IP version 6 (IPv6) (S. Deering and R. Hidned, Dec. 1998), which has been defined to ultimately replace IP. Using dual stack mechanism, a router is equipped with a double set of protocol stack (IPv4 and IPv6). The router can send and receive datagrams belonging to IPv4/IPv6 and it can also forward IP packets to a node in the IPv4 and IPv6 network. To forward IPv4 and IPv6 packets, a dual stack router has to be able to manage IPv4 and IPv6 forwarding table separately. For these IPv4/IPv6 packet forwarding, we designed and implemented forwarding control plane software based on network processing forum standard APIs for control and data plane interaction.