Network Processors Applied to IPv4/IPv6 Transition
01 January 2003
We believe that during the course of the gradual deployment of IPv6, NAPT-PT protocol/address/port translation will be required and this functionality will move inwards from the very edge of the network to the edge of a provider network. Our preliminary results suggest that network processors are capable of significant speedup of NAPT-PT and firewall processing compared to general purpose processors. A reasonably simple redundancy protocol allows further scaling through load balancing and the fault tolerance needed for deployment deeper in the network than is common today.