A platform for porting IPv4 applications to IPv6

Abstract

Developing a new application goes through several stages which need a lot of effort from analysts, designers, and programmers which results in large sums of money as well as wasted time. It is also known that currently there are a lot of applications that only support IPv4 network. Building a new application from scratch that supports the IPv6 network is very expensive. Re-engineering these applications that support the IPv4 network to make them support the IPv6 network is the best solution to reduce effort and cost. The aim of this paper is to design and implementation of a platform used for automatic porting the C++ IPv4 network applications to IPv6, by using partial re-engineering approach the system is only partially reengineered, the re-engineered system portion shall be integrated with the current non reengineered portion, this reduces potential system improvements. the main process of the porting is done by replacing all the IPv4 dependent statement with its corresponding IPv6 dependent statement. Furthermore, replacing all constant value of IPv4 addresses to the suitable IPv6. The proposed platform will reduce the cost for porting network applications to support IPv6 in different proportion according to the size of the application to be ported.