UPnP Extensions for Public IPv4 Sharing in IPv6 Environment

Public IPv4 sharing solutions with port restriction alleviate IPv4 address depletion problem and encourage IPv6 deployment. This paper proposes extensions to the Internet Gateway Device control standardized in the UPnP Forum to efficiently solve the port reservation failure problem in an IPv6 access network environment that adopts a public IPv4 sharing mechanism, i.e., a public IPv4 address is shared by multiple Internet Gateways with disjoint port ranges. The proposed extensions are also backward compatible to legacy ones and are applicable to other public IPv4 sharing solutions.