Maintaining the progress of IPv6 adoption

Even though IPv6 adoption has accelerated in recent years, the complete migration of the Internet still faces many challenges. There are multiple factors that can potentially affect, negatively or positively, the future adoption of IPv6 by various Internet stakeholders. This situation begs the question of “what could be done to avoid derailing the IPv6 adoption progress?” and “how different factors can help maintain its acceleration?” There has been significant interest in those questions, and the paper proposes a series of models to investigate and shed light on them. The results confirm the effect of a number of known factors, while also providing new insight. Particularly, they highlight the destabilizing impact of disagreement across Internet Service Providers (ISPs) on immediate migration to IPv6, and show the benefits of minimal coordination among them in offering IPv6 as an option. They also show what affects technology transition in a large network with complex dependencies such as the Internet. Using robustness analyses, the findings are shown to hold in the presence of different assumptions and scenarios.