On Fri, Aug 2, 2019 at 3:49 PM Brian J. Murrell <brian@interlinx.bc.ca> wrote:
Will any of these (including MAP-E) support such nasty (in terms of burying IP addresses in data payloads) protocols as FTP and SIP/SDP?
All MAP-E does is reserving a port range for each customer. So customer A might be assigned port range 2000-2999, customer B gets 3000-3999 etc. The traffic is then routed to the correct customer using port range in addition to the destination IP address. This is done by encapsulating the original IPv4 packet in an IPv6 tunnel packet. Multiple customers share an IPv4 address each with an assigned port range. The customer CPE router does what it has always done. It does the NAT function but is restricted to only use the port numbers assigned. Therefore anything that works today will continue to work, providing it does not require access to hard coded port numbers. So customer A can not run a web server on port 80. But he could run a web server on port 2080 if he wanted to. Of course few customers are going to run inbound services with this setup. NAT helpers on the CPE for FTP and SIP should work as expected. I like the approach because no actual NAT is going on in the ISP network. It is almost the same as dual stack except a few bits of the port number is used for routing purposes. You need a device to do the MAP encapsulation but everything else in your network only has to do ordinary IPv6. Many core routers have MAP support now, so you might not even need a dedicated MAP encapsulation device. Regards, Baldur