March 29, 2022

Can NAT 64 Solve IPv4 Exhaustion?

IPv4 is the fourth version of the internet protocol and makes use of a 32-bit address. This protocol was in use since 1981. That said, these IPv4 addresses are reaching exhaustion limits. Furthermore, they are currently handling nearly 90% of the internet traffic internationally. The number of unallocated IPv4 addresses has decreased a lot since 2003. The IPv4 exhaustion started for LACNIC, AFRINIC, APNIC, and ARIN in 2011. After that time, the RIRs only had those IPv4 addresses that were not subscribed or no longer in use.

What Is NAT64?

NAT64 or Network Translation IPv6 was introduced to ensure the smooth progress of network communication that is established by IPv4 and IPv6 hosts and networks only. NAT65 can be regarded as a technology to facilitate IPv6 transition. Owning to the decreasing pool of IPv6 addresses, IPv6 migration was crucial. Various options like tunneling, transition, and dual-stack were considered in migrating from IPv4 to IPv6. Among these options, translation was adopted to assist network communication between IPv4 and IPv6 networks and hosts.

NAT64 has two main benefits:

• The migration process was seamless and gradual while ensuring that the experience was consistent.
• Content enablers and providers were not necessary to make any alterations to the network infrastructure and could provide services to IPv6 users via the NAT64 translation technology.

Network Address Translation IPv6 is stateless and as well as stateful. A stateful NAT64 connection makes a device-to-device relationship and allows to make an easy network connection with IPv4 from IPv6 servers. In the case of a NAT64 stateless connection, the IPv6-only host gets to perform the address mapping of IPv6 to IPv4. NAT64 maps IPv6 addresses to IPv4 through an algorithm. This will let traffic following various protocols freely flow while maintaining their IPv4 addresses.

Issues With NAT64

NAT64 poses its challenges to network administrators. A few of the significant issues with NAT64 are outlined below.
• The translation technology does not ensure balanced translation as the number of IPv6 addresses is much more than that of IPv4 addresses.
• The NAT64 stateless connections need address mapping only by IPv6 hosts.
• The NAT64 might resemble a DoS attack on a few security devices.

These are some of the major issues with the Network Address Translation IPv6 translation technology. Let us hope that these issues will be resolved to facilitate an easy transition to IPv6 thereby solving the IPv4 exhaustion problem.