Service providers world-wide are facing challenges of network operations, management, security, quality of service and address deficiency problem while the current world network still run with the existing legacy system. The issues of address shortage including the problems of legacy IPv4 address have been resolved with the advancement on IPv6 addresses. Similarly the increasing complexities of networking management have also been addressed by the advancement on Software Defined Network (SDN). For the future sustainability, service providers have to migrate their existing network to newer technologies. This requires upgrades on or replacement of existing networking devices that are operating on real time. But the lack of sufficient cost, technical human resources and suitable migration plan are becoming the major challenges for the fairly sustained service providers to migrate their existing network into next generation programmable network.SDN and IPv6 are the two new paradigms in networking operation and management that jointly after migration addresses all the existing issues of current networking system. In this paper, we present a greedy algorithm to identify the migration cost of network devices in the optimal path based on customer demand for incremental adoption of SDN enabled IPv6 network. We justify that a unified migration approach to SDN and IPv6 network would help to reduce the total cost of migration. We also verify that sequence of migration considering customer demand and cost constraints give the good estimation for unified migration to Software Defined IPv6 (SoDIP6) network.

Recent advancement in the field of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has encouraged all stakeholders to move towards the new networking paradigm. Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) addressing, Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are regarded as technologies for enhancing network efficiency and effectiveness. However, the technology migration becomes one of the central challenges for the stakeholders such as service providers, end users, and regulatory bodies. This is more challenging in case of developing countries due to lack of sufficient cost and skilled human resources. In this paper, we provide an overview and survey of SDN and IPv6 networking technologies, their benefits and future challenges. Then we introduce Software Defined IPv6 (SoDIP6) network as a next generation networking technologies and their unified approach of deployment over the Tier-3 ISPs of the developing nations that could help for speedy and smooth migration with optimized cost. The demonstrated superior features of SDN enabled IPv6 network from different perspectives with its contributions to green ICT are recognized as the networks of the future generation in the networking world.

Summary With the increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, current networking world is suffering in terms of management and operations with lack of IPv4 addresses leading to issues like network address translation (NAT) proliferation, security and quality of services. Software‐defined networking (SDN) and Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) are the new networking paradigms evolved to address related issues of legacy IPv4 networking. To adapt with global competitive environment and avoid all existing issues in legacy networking system, network service providers have to migrate their networks into IPv6 and SDN‐enabled networks. But immediate transformations of existing network are not viable due to several factors like higher cost of migration, lack of technical human resources, lack of standards and protocols during transitions, and many more. In this paper, we present the migration analysis for proper decision making of network transition in terms of customer demand, traffic engineering, and organizational strength with operation expenditure for network migration using evolutionary gaming approach. Joint migration to SDN‐enabled IPv6 network from game theoretic perspective is modeled and is validated using numerical results obtained from simulations. Our empirical analysis shows the evolutionary process of network migration while different internal and external factors in the organization affect the overall migration. Evolutionary game in migration planning is supportive in decision making for service providers to develop suitable strategy for their network migration. The proposed approach for migration decision making is mostly applicable to fairly sustained service providers who lack economics, regulation/policy, and resources strengths.

The use of information and communication technology (ICT) has resulted in significant impacts on social welfare, economic growth, transparency, and good governance in developing countries like Nepal. Due to the diverse geographic and economic situations, ICT network and service expansions throughout Nepal have been becoming quite challenging. Private network operators mostly have confined their services to urban areas. Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA) collects 2% royalty form Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Telecom Operators as Rural Telecommunications Disbursement Fund (RTDF) to enhance ICT services to rural Nepal. Broadband expansion projects initiated by utilizing RTDF to expand ICT infrastructure throughout Nepal are expected to have considerable societal and economical transformations in the rural communities of Nepal. This paper not only presents the current ICT deployment scenario of Nepal but also studies design, analysis, and evaluation of green networking that leverages both software defined networking (SDN), and Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)-aka Software Defined IPv6 (SoDIP6)-for energy efficient networking, robust services, and sustainable ICT ecosystem for developing nations like Nepal. We evaluate the SoDIP6 network by considering a typical ISP with end access networks and present benefits and recommendations. Experimental results show that the proposed SoDIP6 network help significantly reduce the energy consumption and carbon footprint leading to overall economic benefits to service providers and the society. Furthermore, energy-saving practices through SoDIP6 networks and some policy directions to the government to focus on green networking considering sensitivity of climate change and global warming impact in the mountainous and developing countries like Nepal are presented.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Summary This paper studies a problem for seamless migration of legacy networks of Internet service providers to a software‐defined networking (SDN)‐based architecture along with the transition to the full adoption of the Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) connectivity. Migration of currently running legacy IPv4 networks into such new approaches requires either upgrades or replacement of existing networking devices and technologies that are actively operating. The joint migration to SDN and IPv6 network is considered to be vital in terms of migration cost optimization, skilled human resource management, and other critical factors. In this work, we first present the approaches of SDN and IPv6 migration in service providers' networks. Then, we present the common concerns of IPv6 and SDN migration with joint transition strategies so that the cost associated with joint migration is minimized to lower than that of the individual migration. For the incremental adoption of software‐defined IPv6 (SoDIP6) network with optimum migration cost, a greedy algorithm is proposed based on optimal path and the customer priority. Simulation and empirical analysis show that a unified transition planning to SoDIP6 network results in lower migration cost.

The logical separation of the data plane and the control plane of the network device conceptually defined by software-defined networking (SDN) creates many opportunities to create smart networking with better efficiency for network management and operation. SDN implementation over telecommunications (Telcos) and Internet service provider (ISP) networks is a challenging issue due to the lack of a high maturity level of SDN-based standards and several other critical factors that are considered during the real-time migration of existing legacy IPv4 networks. Different migration approaches have been studied; however, none of them seem to be close to realizing implementation. This paper implements the SDN-IP and Open Network Operating System (ONOS) SDN controller to migrate legacy IPv4 networks to multi-domain software-defined IPv6 (SoDIP6) networks and experimentally evaluate the viability of joint network migration in the ISP networks. We present results using extensive simulations for the suitable placement of the master ONOS controller during network migration by considering minimum control path latency using optimal path routing and the breadth first router replacement (BFR) technique. Our empirical analysis and evaluations show that the identification of the median router to attach the master controller and router migration planning using BFR give better results for carrier-grade legacy networks’ migration to SoDIP6 networks.

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