Building an IPv6 upgrade model based upon cost-effective strategies

While confronting the global IPv4 address exhaustion, it is important and crucial for the entire Internet environment to smoothly upgrade to the next generation Internet Protocol, IPv6. Due to the budget constraints, different organizations should decide the priority of the IPv6 upgrade among all the provided services according to the degree of the necessity and the difficulty of the upgrade. Our idea is firstly to upgrade external network services of governmental agencies as the driving force of the upgrade in the country and secondly to use cost-effective and adaptive strategies to have a seamless transition. Therefore, in this study, we proposed a two-stage IPv6 upgrade model to progressively execute the IPv6 upgrade according to the defined priorities of the services of the governmental organization. The first one, service-based survey stage, is to find the difficulty and problems of the IPv6 deployment using a small-scale trial survey to a full-scale survey strategy. The second one, the adaptive upgrade stage, is to provide the adaptive upgrade support or solution for different services according to the corresponding survey results. Besides, 16 IPv6 supporting teams consisting of 40 university professors and experts have been formed to help nearby organizations in the IPv6 upgrade. In this study, the proposed IPv6 upgrade model is successfully implemented on Taiwan Government Network Services. Using this model, we can cost-effectively handle the large number of network services in the IPv6 upgrade. Up to now, the upgrading rate is much higher than the original expected one to show the feasibility and effectiveness of this study.