Part III: IPv4 and IPv6: Coexistence and Integration

The transition from the IPv4 protocol, on which the current Internet core is based, toward IPv6 is crucial for a strong adoption and large-scale deployment of IPv6. The IPv6 protocol has been designed from the beginning with transition in mind to maintain complete backward compatibility with IPv4. Part III describes the coexistence, integration mechanisms, strategies, and approaches in IPv6 designed to provide a smooth transition of IPv4 networks to IPv6. These include dual-stack, the tunneling of IPv6 packets in IPv4, and protocol translation.

On the practical side, Part III presents in detail the new commands added in the Cisco IOS Software for the integration and coexistence mechanisms. Finally, this part explains how to enable IPv6 and configure transition mechanisms on several host operating systems such as Microsoft, Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux, and Tru64 to interact with Cisco routers.

The following chapters comprise this part of the book: