Internet Evolution with IPswen: Towards the Next Generation TCP/IPv4 Internet Architecture

Since the advent of IPv6 in the late 1990s, the Internet has included two parallel protocol stacks: TCP/IPv4 and TCP/IPv6. Although the “legacy” IPv4 part of the Internet is generally recognized as being “ossified” due to the decade-long depletion of the small IPv4 address space, it is still the dominant part of the public Internet, and will coexist with IPv6 at any time in the foreseeable future. In this paper we discuss a unique opportunity for the continued evolution of the IPv4 Internet based on IPswen and its coexistence strategy with IPv6. We here emphasize two crucial aspects of this approach, namely, (1) making use of IPswen's special technical advantages for the long-term evolution of the Internet, and (2) avoiding conventional “IPv6 groupthink” to enable healthy coexistence and independent development of the two IP technology bases. We argue that it is necessary as well as responsible for the Internet community to maintain and extend the TCP/IPv4 architecture using IPswen (or the like extensions) exactly like what we have successfully done using previous evolutionary technological innovations including CIDR, NAT44 and VPN, while deploying IPv6 in more limited application domains or highly controlled environments for better coexistence and interworking with the public Internet.