UNA: provision of accessibility from the IPv4 internet to other networks

Abstract

The address space shortage problem in the IPv4 Internet was forecasted a long time ago, and many earlier attempts to resolve the problem were combined to form a promising solution, IPv6. However, the deployment of IPv6 has been delayed. As a result, new mechanisms and architecture to expand the IPv4 Internet or to replace it have been presented, with no prominent success. A main reason of slow deployment of IPv6 and new proposals is lack of reasonable accessibility from the IPv4 Internet to new networks. We present UNA (universal network adaptation), which provides scalable accessibility from the IPv4 Internet (including private IPv4 networks) to any other non-public-IPv4 networks. In UNA, LASes (local autonomous systems) are built in IPv4 subscriber networks to provide communication channels from IPv4 hosts in LASes to non-public-IPv4 networks, and no host needs to be modified.