The analysis of IPv6 adaptation to the industrial network protocol

Due to the deployment of the Internet throughout the world, the IPv4 addresses, which are supporting the Internet, are predicted to run out around 2011. The industrial world has been preparing to the transition to IPv6. Recently, IP is being introduced to the field bus protocols, which is used in the industrial network. Due to its enormous amount of addresses, IPv6 can provide seamless end-to-end communications between devices. Therefore IPv6 is considered to be a more suitable protocol than IPv4 for the fieldbus protocols. However, many kinds of fieldbus protocols are designed to work on IPv4, because most of them were designed before 2000. This paper introduces the requirements and issues to adapt the fieldbus protocols to IPv6 by investigating FOUNDATION Fieldbus HSE as the representative of IP based fieldbus protocols.