A platform for porting IPv4 applications to IPv6

Abstract

Developing a new application passes through several stages needing considerable effort from analysts, designers, and programmers, which can be extremely time-consuming and often results in the unnecessary expenditure of large sums of money. It is also known that there is currently a myriad of applications that only support the internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) network. Building a new application from scratch that supports the internet protocol version 6 (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 implement a platform used for automatically porting the C++, C#, and visual basic IPv4 network applications to IPv6, by using a partial re-engineering approach. The re-engineered system portion shall be integrated with the current non-re-engineered portion. The main process of porting is conducted by replacing all the IPv4 dependent statements with their corresponding IPv6 dependent statements. Furthermore, all constant values of IPv4 addresses are replaced by suitable IPv6 ones. The proposed porting platform will reduce the duration time for porting network applications to support IPv6 to minutes rather than hours, days, months in manual porting.