Practical Evaluation of Stateful NAT64/DNS64 Translation
It is often suggested that the approach to IPv6 transition is dual-stack deployment; however, it is not feasible in certain environments. As Network Address Translation - Protocol Translation (NAT-PT) has been deprecated, stateful NAT64 and DNS64 RFCs have been published, supporting only IPv6-to-IPv4 translation scenario. Now the question of usability in the real world arises. In this paper, we systematically test a number of widely used application-layer network protocols to find out how well they traverse Ecdysis, the first open source stateful NAT64 and DNS64 implementation. We practically evaluated 18 popular protocols, among them HTTP, RDP, MSNP, and IMAP, and discuss the shortcomings of such translations that might not be apparent at first sight.
network address translation protocols ip networks next-generation networking domain name system