Network Working Group M. Boucadair, Ed.
Internet-Draft France Telecom
Intended status: Informational S. Matsushima
Expires: December 11, 2011 Softbank Telecom
Y. Lee
Comcast
O. Bonness
Deutsche Telekom
I. Borges
Portugal Telecom
G. Chen
China Mobile
June 9, 2011
Motivations for Stateless IPv4 over IPv6 Migration Solutions
draft-operators-softwire-stateless-4v6-motivation-02
Abstract
IPv4 service continuity is one of the most sensitive problems that
must be resolved by Service Providers during the IPv6 transition
period - especially after the exhaustion of the public IPv4 address
space. Current standardization effort that addresses IPv4 service
continuity focuses on stateful mechanisms. This document elaborates
on the motivations for the need to undertake a companion effort to
specify stateless IPv4 over IPv6 approaches.
Status of this Memo
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This Internet-Draft will expire on December 11, 2011.
Copyright Notice
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Copyright (c) 2011 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Why Stateless IPv4 over IPv6 Solutions are Needed? . . . . . . 5
3.1. Network Architecture Simplification . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.1.1. Network Dimensioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.1.2. No Intra-domain Constraint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.1.3. Logging - No Need for Dynamic Binding Notifications . 5
3.1.4. No Additional Protocol for Port Control is Required . 6
3.1.5. Bandwidth Saving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.2. Operational Tasks and Network Maintenance Efficiency . . . 6
3.2.1. Preserve Current Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.2.2. Planned Maintenance Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.2.3. Reliability and Robustness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.2.4. Support of Multi-Vendor Redundancy . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.2.5. Simplification of Qualification Procedures . . . . . . 7
3.3. Facilitating Service Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.3.1. Implicit Host Identification . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.3.2. No Organizational Impact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.4. Cost Minimization Opportunities . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
7. Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
8. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
9. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
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1. Introduction
When the global IPv4 address space is exhausted, Service Providers
will be left with an address pool that cannot be increased anymore.
Many services and network scenarios will be impacted by the lack of
IPv4 public addresses. Providing access to the (still limited) IPv6
Internet only won't be sufficient to address the needs of customers,
as most of them will continue to access legacy IPv4-only services.
Service Providers must guarantee their customers that they can still
access IPv4 contents although they will not be provisioned with a
global IPv4 address anymore. Means to share IPv4 public addresses
are unavoidable [I-D.ietf-intarea-shared-addressing-issues].
Identifying the most appropriate solution(s) to the IPv4 address
exhaustion as well as IPv4 service continuity problems and deploying
them in a real network with real customers is a very challenging and
complex process for all Service Providers. There is nothing like a
"One size fits all" solution or one target architecture that would
work for all situations. Each Service Provider has to take into
account its own context (e.g., service infrastructures), policies and
marketing strategy (a document that informs Service Providers about
the impact of the IPv4 address shortage, and provides some
recommendations and guidelines, is available at [EURESCOM]).
Current standardization effort that is meant to address this IPv4
service continuity issue focuses mainly on stateful mechanisms that
assume the sharing of any global IPv4 address that is left between
several customers, based upon the deployment of NAT (Network Address
Translation) capabilities in the network. Because of some caveats of
such stateful approaches the Service Provider community feels that a
companion effort is required to specify stateless IPv4 over IPv6
approaches. This document provides elaboration on such need.
Particularly, this document describes the motivations for stateless
solutions within the context of an IPv6-enabled network as described
in [RFC6180]. The following table shows the targeted space:
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+---------------+---------------+
| Crossing IPv4 | IPv6-enabled |
| networks | networks |
+-----------+---------------+---------------+
| Stateful | RFC5571 | DS-Lite |
| solution | (L2TP) | |
+-----------+---------------+---------------+
| Stateless | RFC5969 | *Target* |
| solution | (6rd) | *space * |
+-----------+---------------+---------------+
It is explicitly acknowledged by the authors of this document that
both stateful and stateless solutions are required to meet Service
Providers needs and constraints.
More discussions about stateless vs. stateful can be found at
[RFC6144].
2. Terminology
This document makes use of the following terms:
Stateful 4/6 solution (or stateful solution in short): denotes a
solution where the network maintains user-session
states relying on the activation of a NAT
function in the Service Providers' network
[I-D.ietf-behave-lsn-requirements]. The NAT
function is responsible for sharing the same IPv4
address among several subscribers and to maintain
user-session state.
Stateless 4/6 solution (or stateless solution in short): denotes a
solution which does not require any user-session
state (see Section 2.3 of [RFC1958]) to be
maintained by any IP address sharing function in
the Service Provider's network. This category of
solutions assumes a dependency between an IPv6
prefix and IPv4 address. In an IPv4 address
sharing context, dedicated functions are required
to be enabled in the CPE router to restrict the
source IPv4 port numbers. Within this document,
"port set" and "port range" terms are used
interchangeably.
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3. Why Stateless IPv4 over IPv6 Solutions are Needed?
This section discusses motivations for preferring a deployment of
stateless 4/6 solutions. The technical and operational benefits of
the stateless solutions are possible because no per-user state
[RFC1958] is maintained in the Service Providers networks.
3.1. Network Architecture Simplification
The activation of this stateless function in the Service Provider's
network does not introduce any major constraint on the network
architecture and its engineering. The following sub-sections
elaborate on these aspects.
3.1.1. Network Dimensioning
Because no user-state [RFC1958] is required, a stateless solution
does not need to take into account the maximum number of simultaneous
user-sessions and the maximum number of new user-sessions per second
to dimension its networking equipment. Like current network
dimensioning practices, only considerations related to the customer
number, traffic trends and the bandwidth usage need be taken into
account for dimensioning purposes.
3.1.2. No Intra-domain Constraint
Stateless IPv4/IPv6 interconnection functions can be ideally located
at the boundaries of an Autonomous System (e.g., ASBR routers that
peer with external IPv4 domains); in such case:
Intra-domain paths are not altered: there is no need to force IP
packets to cross a given node for instance; intra-domain routing
processes are not tweaked to direct the traffic to dedicated
nodes. In particular, stateless solutions optimizes CPE-to-CPE
communication in that packets don't go through the interconnection
function since the address and port mapping has been realized
based on a well defined mapping schema that is known to all
involved devices.
3.1.3. Logging - No Need for Dynamic Binding Notifications
Network abuse reporting requires traceability
[I-D.ietf-intarea-shared-addressing-issues]. To provide such
traceability, prior to IPv4 address sharing, logging the IPv4 address
assigned to a user was sufficient and generates relatively small
logs. The advent of stateful IPv4 address allows dynamic port
assignment, which then requires port assignment logging. This
logging of port assignments can be considerable.
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In contrast, static port assignments do not require such considerable
logging. The volume of the logging file may not be seen as an
important criterion for privileging a stateless approach because
stateful approaches can also be configured (or designed) to assign
port ranges and therefore lead to acceptable log volumes.
If a dynamic port assignment mode is used, dedicated interfaces and
protocols must be supported to forward binding data records towards
dedicated platforms. The activation of these dynamic notifications
may impact the performance of the dedicated device. For stateless
solutions, there is no need for dynamic procedures (e.g., using
SYSLOG) to notify a mediation platform about assigned bindings.
Some Service Providers have a requirement to use only existing
logging systems and to avoid introducing new ones (mainly because of
CAPEX considerations). This requirement is easily met with stateless
solutions.
3.1.4. No Additional Protocol for Port Control is Required
The deployment of stateless solution does not require the deployment
of new dynamic signaling protocols to the end-user CPE in addition to
those already used. In particular, existing protocols (e.g., UPnP
IGD:2 [UPnP-IGD]) can be used to control the NAT mapping in the CPE.
3.1.5. Bandwidth Saving
In same particular network scenarios (e.g., wireless network ),
spectrum is very valuable and scarce resource. Service providers
usually wish to eliminate unnecessary overhead to save bandwidth
consumption in such environment. Service providers need to consider
optimizing the form of packet processing when encapsulation is used.
Since existing header compression techniques are stateful, it is
expected that stateless solution minimize overhead introduced by the
solution.
3.2. Operational Tasks and Network Maintenance Efficiency
3.2.1. Preserve Current Practices
Service Providers require as much as possible to preserve the same
operations as for current IP networking environments.
If stateless solutions are deployed, common practices are preserved.
In particular, the maintenance and operation of the network do not
require any additional constraints such as: path optimization
practices, enforcing traffic engineering policies, issues related to
traffic oscillation between stateful devices, load-balancing the
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traffic or load sharing the traffic among egress/ingress points can
be used, etc. In particular:
o anycast-based schemes can be used for load-balancing and
redundancy purposes.
o asymmetric routing to/from the IPv4 Internet is natively supported
and no path-pinning mechanisms have to be additionally
implemented.
3.2.2. Planned Maintenance Operations
Since no state is maintained by stateless IPv4/IPv6 interconnection
nodes, no additional constraint needs to be taken into account when
upgrading these nodes (e.g., adding a new service card, upgrading
hardware, periodic reboot of the devices, etc.). In particular,
current practices that are enforced to (gracefully) reboot or to
shutdown routers can be maintained.
3.2.3. Reliability and Robustness
Compared to current practices (i.e., without a CGN in place), no
additional capabilities are required to ensure reliability and
robustness in the context of stateless solutions. Since no state is
maintained in the Service Provider's network, state synchronization
procedures are not required.
High availability (including failure recovery) is ensured owing to
best current practices in the field.
3.2.4. Support of Multi-Vendor Redundancy
Deploying stateful techniques, especially when used in the Service
Providers networks, constrain severely deploying multi-vendor
redundancy since very often proprietary vendor-specific protocols are
used to synchronize state. This is not an issue for the stateless
case. Concretely, the activation of the stateless IPv4/IPv6
interconnection function does not prevent nor complicate deploying
devices from different vendors.
This criterion is very important for Service Providers having a
sourcing policy to avoid mono-vendor deployments and to operate
highly-available networks composed on multi-vendors equipment.
3.2.5. Simplification of Qualification Procedures
The introduction of new functions and nodes into operational networks
follows strict procedures elaborated by Service Providers. These
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procedures include in-lab testing and field trials. Because of their
nature, stateless implementations optimize testing times and
procedures:
o The specification of test suites to be conducted should be
shorter;
o The required testing resources (in terms of manpower) are likely
to be less solicited that they are for stateful approaches.
One of the privileged approaches to integrate stateless IPv4/IPv6
interconnection function consists in embedding stateless capabilities
in existing operational nodes (e.g., IP router). In this case, any
software or hardware update would require to execute non-regression
testing activities. In the context of the stateless solutions, the
non-regression testing load due to an update of the stateless code is
expected to be minimal.
For the stateless case, testing effort and non-regression testing are
to be taken into account for the CPE side. This effort is likely to
be lightweight compared to the testing effort, including the non-
regression testing, of a stateful function which is co-located with
other routing functions for instance.
3.3. Facilitating Service Evolution
3.3.1. Implicit Host Identification
Service Providers do not offer only IP connectivity services but also
added value services (a.k.a., internal services). Upgrading these
services to be IPv6-enabled is not sufficient because of legacy
devices. In some deployments, the delivery of these added-value
services relies on implicit identification mechanism based on the
source IPv4 address. Due to address sharing, implicit identification
will fail [I-D.ietf-intarea-shared-addressing-issues]; replacing
implicit identification with explicit authentication will be seen as
a non acceptable service regression by the end users (less Quality of
Experience (QoE)).
When a stateless solution is deployed, implicit identification for
internal services is likely to be easier to implement: the implicit
identification should be updated to take into account the port range
and the IPv4 address. Techniques as those analyzed in
[I-D.boucadair-intarea-nat-reveal-analysis] are not required for the
delivery of these internal services if a stateless solution is
deployed.
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3.3.2. No Organizational Impact
Stateless solutions rely on IP-related techniques to share and to
deliver IPv4 packets over an IPv6 network. In particular, IPv4
packets are delivered without any modification to their destination
CPE. As such there is a clear separation between the IP/transport
layers and the service layers; no service interference is to be
observed when a stateless solution is deployed. This clear
separation:
Facilitates service evolution: Since the payload of IPv4 packets is
not altered in the path, services can evolve without requiring any
specific function in the Service Provider's network;
Limits vendor dependency: The upgrade of value-added services does
not involve any particular action from vendors that provide
devices embedding the stateless IPv4/IPv6 interconnection
function.
No service-related skills are required for network operators who
manage devices that embed the IPv4/IPv6 interconnection function: IP
teams can be in charge of these devices; there is a priori no need
to create a dedicated team to manage and to operate devices
embedding the stateless IPv4/IPv6 interconnection function. The
introduction of stateless capabilities in the network are unlikely
to degrade management costs.
3.4. Cost Minimization Opportunities
To make decision for which solution is to be adopted, service
providers usually undertake comparative studies about viable
technical solutions. It is not only about technical aspects but also
economical optimization (both CAPEX and OPEX considerations).
From a Service Provider perspective, stateless solutions are more
attractive because they do less impact the current network operations
and maintenance model that is widely based on stateless approaches.
Table 1 shows the general correspondence between technical benefits
and potential economic reduction opportunities.
While not all Service Providers environments are the same, a detailed
case study from one Service Provider
[I-D.matsushima-v6ops-transition-experience] reports that stateless
transition solutions can be considerably less expensive than stateful
transition solutions.
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+---------------+--------------------------------------+------------+
| Section | Technical and Operation Benefit | Cost Area |
+---------------+--------------------------------------+------------+
| Section 3.1.1 | Network dimensioning | Network |
+---------------+--------------------------------------+------------+
| Section 3.1.2 | No Intra-domain constraint | Network |
+---------------+--------------------------------------+------------+
| Section 3.1.3 | Logging | Network & |
| | | Ops |
+---------------+--------------------------------------+------------+
| Section 3.1.4 | No additional control protocol | Network |
+---------------+--------------------------------------+------------+
| Section 3.2.1 | Preserve current practices | Ops |
+---------------+--------------------------------------+------------+
| Section 3.2.2 | Planned maintenance | Ops |
+---------------+--------------------------------------+------------+
| Section 3.2.3 | Reliability and robustness | Network & |
| | | Ops |
+---------------+--------------------------------------+------------+
| Section 3.2.4 | Multi-Vendor Redundancy | Network |
+---------------+--------------------------------------+------------+
| Section 3.2.5 | Simple qualification | Ops |
+---------------+--------------------------------------+------------+
| Section 3.3.1 | Implicit Host Identification for | Ops |
| | internal services | |
+---------------+--------------------------------------+------------+
| Section 3.3.2 | Organizational Impact | Ops |
+---------------+--------------------------------------+------------+
Table 1: Cost minimization considerations
4. Conclusion
As discussed in Section 3, stateless solutions provide several
interesting features. Trade-off between the positive vs. negative
aspects of stateless solutions is left to Service Providers. Each
Service Provider will have to select the appropriate solution
(stateless, stateful or even both) meeting its requirements.
This document recommends to undertake as soon as possible the
appropriate standardization effort to specify a stateless IPv4 over
IPv6 solution.
5. IANA Considerations
No action is required from IANA.
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6. Security Considerations
Except for the less efficient port randomization of and routing loops
[I-D.ietf-v6ops-tunnel-loops], stateless 4/6 solutions are expected
to introduce no more security vulnerabilities than stateful ones.
Because of their stateless nature, they may in addition reduce denial
of service opportunities.
7. Contributors
The following individuals have contributed to this document:
Christian Jacquenet
France Telecom
Email: christian.jacquenet@orange-ftgroup.com
Pierre Levis
France Telecom
Email: pierre.levis@orange-ftgroup.com
Masato Yamanishi
SoftBank BB
Email: myamanis@bb.softbank.co.jp
Yuji Yamazaki
Softbank Mobile
Email: yuyamaza@bb.softbank.co.jp
Hui Deng
China Mobile
53A,Xibianmennei Ave.
Beijing 100053
P.R.China
Phone: +86-13910750201
Email: denghui02@gmail.com
8. Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the following individuals who provided valuable
comments:
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+---------------+---------------+---------------+---------------+
| X. Deng | W. Dec | D. Wing | A. Baudot |
| E. Burgey | L. Cittadini | R. Despres | J. Zorz |
| M. Townsley | L. Meillarec | R. Maglione | J. Queiroz |
| C. Xie | X. Li | O. Troan | J. Qin |
| B. Sarikaya | | | |
+---------------+---------------+---------------+---------------+
9. Informative References
[EURESCOM]
Levis, P., Borges, I., Bonness, O. and L. Dillon L., "IPv4
address exhaustion: Issues and Solutions for Service
Providers", March 2010, <http://archive.eurescom.eu/~pub/
deliverables/documents/P1900-series/P1952/D2bis/
P1952-D2bis.pdf>.
[I-D.boucadair-intarea-nat-reveal-analysis]
Boucadair, M., Touch, J., and P. Levis, "Analysis of
Solution Candidates to Reveal the Origin IP Address in
Shared Address Deployments",
draft-boucadair-intarea-nat-reveal-analysis-01 (work in
progress), March 2011.
[I-D.ietf-behave-lsn-requirements]
Perreault, S., Yamagata, I., Miyakawa, S., Nakagawa, A.,
and H. Ashida, "Common requirements for IP address sharing
schemes", draft-ietf-behave-lsn-requirements-01 (work in
progress), March 2011.
[I-D.ietf-intarea-shared-addressing-issues]
Ford, M., Boucadair, M., Durand, A., Levis, P., and P.
Roberts, "Issues with IP Address Sharing",
draft-ietf-intarea-shared-addressing-issues-05 (work in
progress), March 2011.
[I-D.ietf-v6ops-tunnel-loops]
Nakibly, G. and F. Templin, "Routing Loop Attack using
IPv6 Automatic Tunnels: Problem Statement and Proposed
Mitigations", draft-ietf-v6ops-tunnel-loops-07 (work in
progress), May 2011.
[I-D.matsushima-v6ops-transition-experience]
Matsushima, S., Yamazaki, Y., Sun, C., Yamanishi, M., and
J. Jiao, "Use case and consideration experiences of IPv4
to IPv6 transition",
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draft-matsushima-v6ops-transition-experience-02 (work in
progress), March 2011.
[RFC1958] Carpenter, B., "Architectural Principles of the Internet",
RFC 1958, June 1996.
[RFC6144] Baker, F., Li, X., Bao, C., and K. Yin, "Framework for
IPv4/IPv6 Translation", RFC 6144, April 2011.
[RFC6180] Arkko, J. and F. Baker, "Guidelines for Using IPv6
Transition Mechanisms during IPv6 Deployment", RFC 6180,
May 2011.
[UPnP-IGD]
UPnP Forum, "Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) Internet
Gateway Device (IGD) V 2.0", December 2010,
<http://upnp.org/specs/gw/igd2/>.
Authors' Addresses
Mohamed Boucadair (editor)
France Telecom
Rennes, 35000
France
Email: mohamed.boucadair@orange-ftgroup.com
Satoru Matsushima
Softbank Telecom
Tokyo
Japan
Email: satoru.matsushima@tm.softbank.co.jp
Yiu Lee
Comcast
US
Email: Yiu_Lee@Cable.Comcast.com
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Olaf Bonness
Deutsche Telekom
Germany
Email: Olaf.Bonness@telekom.de
Isabel Borges
Portugal Telecom
Portugal
Email: Isabel@ptinovacao.pt
Gang Chen
China Mobile
53A,Xibianmennei Ave.
Beijing, Xuanwu District 100053
China
Email: chengang@chinamobile.com
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