Joint Cost Estimation Approach for Service Provider Legacy Network Migration to Unified Software Defined IPv6 Network

Service providers world-wide are facing challenges of network operations, management, security, quality of service and address deficiency problem while the current world network still run with the existing legacy system. The issues of address shortage including the problems of legacy IPv4 address have been resolved with the advancement on IPv6 addresses. Similarly the increasing complexities of networking management have also been addressed by the advancement on Software Defined Network (SDN). For the future sustainability, service providers have to migrate their existing network to newer technologies. This requires upgrades on or replacement of existing networking devices that are operating on real time. But the lack of sufficient cost, technical human resources and suitable migration plan are becoming the major challenges for the fairly sustained service providers to migrate their existing network into next generation programmable network. SDN and IPv6 are the two new paradigms in networking operation and management that jointly after migration addresses all the existing issues of current networking system. In this paper, we present a greedy algorithm to identify the migration cost of network devices in the optimal path based on customer demand for incremental adoption of SDN enabled IPv6 network. We justify that a unified migration approach to SDN and IPv6 network would help to reduce the total cost of migration. We also verify that sequence of migration considering customer demand and cost constraints give the good estimation for unified migration to Software Defined IPv6 (SoDIP6) network.