Game-theoretic analysis of IPv4-IPv6 migration process

The rate of deployment and adoption issues of new network technologies, IPv6 in particular, have recently been hotly debated in the research community. However, the question of how protocols migrate, especially the dynamics of migration, to new paradigms is still largely open. In this paper, we address the issue from a game theoretic point of view. We model and analyze the profit maximizing strategies of Autonomous Systems (ASes); both the properties of ASes and the topology of the Internet is considered. The contribution our work is threefold. First, we propose an economic model of the ASes and their relations from the IPv4-IPv6 migration viewpoint. Second, we show - after analysing the strategies of ASes using gametheoretic tools - that under the proposed economic model, the all IPv6 AS topology is a Nash equilibrium on any network topology. Third, we apply the findings of evolutionary dynamics on the problem of migration by incorporating Internet-specific properties to the evolutionary model, namely the size of the ASes and the cost of migration. The analyses show that even if IPv6 has higher payoff than IPv4, the whole migration does not happen always fast. Finally, extensive simulations are carried out based on the proposed models to illustrate the impacts of different parameters on the IPv6 migration dynamics in realistic scenarios.