IPv6 Rapid Deployment in Taiwan Academic Network (TANet)

After the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated all the remaining IPv4 address blocks to Regional Internet Registries in February 2011, IPv6 became mandatory to build new Internet networks and services. However, IPv6 networking environment is still not widely constructed and it is conceivably impossible to move from IPv4 to IPv6 with a single stride. Therefore, IPv4/IPv6 transition mechanisms receive great attention since the beginning of IPv6 deployment. Tunneling is one of the transition mechanisms, among which 6to4 tunneling is a popular tunneling mechanism supported by numerous operating systems like Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows. Although theoretically 6to4 is an elegant protocol, there are some limitations that prevent Internet service providers (ISPs) to offer public 6to4 services. To overcome these problems, IPv6 Rapid Deployment (6RD) was proposed in 2007 as an improvement over 6to4 Tunnel. This paper illustrates how to deploy 6RD's Border Relay (BR) and Customer Edge (CE) in Taiwan Academic Network (TANet), so that users in IPv6 islands can communicate with the IPv6 Internet via 6RD Tunnels.