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At CES in Las Vegas, a panel of experts on Internet Protocol technology discussed IPv6 and the benefits of having mobile devices use IPv6 instead of IPv4. As it turns out, IPv6 offers some pretty substantial benefits over IPv4 for mobile networks and the devices that connect to them.
As we’ve mentioned before, IPv6 offers a near-limitless number of addresses. Because of this, NAT (Network Address Translation) is not officially supported in IPv6. In fact, NAT is not supposed to be implemented on IPv6 networks at all. NAT is used to allow multiple devices to share the same IP address. This was necessary in IPv4 because there aren’t enough addresses for everyone and everything. In fact, all IPv4 addresses have now been assigned. There are no new addresses left for anyone.
The implications of every single device having a unique, globally accessible IPv6 address are huge. A little-known fact of mobile IPv4 is that NAT increases the latency by a few milliseconds. This is because the network switch has to translate the IP addresses for routing packets between the public IP address used by the switch, and the internal IP address used by the mobile network. This is also true with most home internet connections as well. We don’t typically notice this with home internet connections because the latency is usually quite low anyway, but it can be especially noticeable on mobile networks (which typically have high latencies).
With a globally accessible unique address per device, it becomes possible to offer quick point-to-point communication. Not to mention, the device doesn’t have to keep telling the NAT layer that it is still connected and waiting for data. This means that the battery will not drain as much when actively (or passively through background app data access) accessing the mobile network to access resources on the internet.
This is especially important for services like Google Talk video chat and Skype. Both of these services rely on direct peer-to-peer communication to work properly in real-time. It is absolutely critical for VoLTE, since it depends on being able to establish direct connections and transferring data in real time. When NAT is inserted in between, it introduces slight lag to the service because of so-called “keep-alive” packets and the requisite bouncing along multiple networks through NAT. The effect could be magnified with lower quality network technologies like DSL and CDMA2000 EV-DO.
Of course, there are a few potential pitfalls. Every device may need a firewall with an intrusion detection system to prevent (and notify) of direct attacks to mobile devices because every device would be directly accessible from the global internet. Antivirus scanning of downloads would become more important because malware that connect to remote systems would have an easier time of connecting directly and maintaining a permanent connection.
Regardless of the pitfalls, the advantages are too important to ignore. That said, very few mobile networks today allow for IPv6 access (even if they assign IPv6 addresses). Notably, LTE networks in Canada and Europe allow IPv6 access, and T-Mobile USA offers full IPv6 support on its network with select devices. Many wireline networks for home and business internet service now offer IPv6 support through “dual-stack” setups. If you have access to IPv6, you should try it out. It’s important to get used to working through IPv6 and building services that operate well over IPv6, since we will soon have to switch over entirely to IPv6.