CASE STUDY

Vox , like many regional and global Internet service providers and network service providers , faced the challenge of the worldwide shortage of IPv4 addresses . With all the roughly 4.2 billion IPv4 addresses already assigned , service providers must assign one IP address to multiple users and use IPv6 addresses for new customers .

They must also translate IPv6 addresses into a format that older IPv4 servers can understand to maintain compatibility . In other words , how do you put both an IPv6 address and an IPv4 address on every interface if you have run out of IPv4 addresses ?

Challenges of CGNAT

Carrier-grade network address translation or CGNAT , is a type of network address translation for use in IPv4 network design . With CGNAT , end sites , in particular residential networks , are configured with private network addresses that are translated to public IPv4 addresses by middlebox network address translator devices embedded in the network operator ’ s network , permitting the sharing of small pools of public addresses among many end sites .

According to Geeks for Geeks , to access the Internet , one public IP address is needed , but we can use a private IP address in our private network . The idea of NAT is to allow multiple devices to access the Internet through a single public address . To achieve this , the translation of a private IP address to a public IP address is required .

Network address translation is a process in which one or more local IP address is translated into one or more global IP address and vice versa to provide Internet access to the local hosts . Also , it does the translation of port numbers , by masking the port number of the host with another port number , in the packet that will be routed to the destination . It then makes the corresponding entries of IP address and port number in the NAT table . NAT generally operates on a router or firewall .

According to CompTIA , IP version 6 , IPv6 was officially launched in 2012 after decades of development . IPv6 was created for many reasons . One of them was to accommodate the need for more IP addresses . This is because traditional NAT itself could not quite keep up with demand . IPv6 uses 128-bit numbered IP addresses , which allow for exponentially more potential IP addresses than IPv4 .

It will take many years before this process finishes ; so until then , using NAT for IPv4 addresses will remain a common practice . More importantly , though , IPv6 does more than just provide a much larger IP address space . IPv6 also makes routing much more efficient .

Digital transformation

The problem has been exacerbated because more and more network-connected devices , especially those that are deployed as Internet of Things and across smart cities , in public networks , want to be always on . That means devices hold on to the addresses they are given , reducing the number of addresses that can be shared on an as-needed basis .

This shifts the NAT function and configuration from the customer premises to the Internet service provider

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