Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor
IP address exhaustion is an issue every Internet service provider must face. With the dwindling of IPv4 addresses, operators must migrate to IPv6 and seamlessly if they are to meet the needs of commercial, residential and mobile services.
For Vodafone Company Kabel Deutschland (KD), Germany’s largest cable operator, it was no question whether the move to IPv6 would be a bolt-on solution or something more integrated. A bolt-on solution would not do for KD, according to a recent Alcatel-Lucent case study on KD. The company needed to address the issue of flexibility to accommodate long-term growth and next generation service delivery without compromising its reputation for high-performance and high-value service.
For KD, the IP edge solution was the Alcatel-Lucent 7750 Service Router (SR), which provides dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6 to end customers. The dual-stack deployment is based on IPv6-only transport in the access domain to ensure future-proof, native IPv6 connectivity. Backward IPv4 connectivity is provided by using IPv4inIPv6 tunneling, with the customer residential gateway representing the B4 (Basic Bridging BroadBand element). At the edge of the cable network the 7750 SR performs the function of an Address Family Transition Router (AFTR) to encapsulate/ de-encapsulate IPv4 traffic in/from IPv6 and provides CG-NAT using the IPv6 source prefix as the subscriber key.
The 7750 SR Flexible Edge capabilities enable KD to separate the IP service routing from the access technology and simplify the cable hub.
“Not only does this enable the delivery of common personalized and differentiated services consistently across multiple access technologies, it enables migration from the existing network architecture to a future mode of operation, as demonstrated in this case from IPv4 to IPv6,” noted the Alcatel-Lucent paper.
The Alcatel-Lucent 5620 Service Aware Manager (SAM) is a key component for KD. It increases service deployment agility through automation, proactively monitors and manages across the multiple layers in the flexible edge, and integrates with KD’s existing BSS/OSS through open APIs.
At the time of the case study, KD had deployed high-redundant clusters based on the Alcatel-Lucent solution in the biggest cities of Germany, each one supporting 16 Million NAT flows. They were integrated step-by-step in sub networks with DOCSIS 3.0 IPv6 rollouts.
The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 can be a problem. But it doesn’t have to be.
