IPv10 Draft Specification Published

It has been about one year since last hearing anything about the Internet Protocol v10 (IPv10) proposal while this week it's now available in draft form.

While IPv6 isn't widely-adopted around the globe yet, IPv10 is already in development and helps to address some of the woes of IPv6. IPv10 is designed to allow IPv6 addresses to communicate to/from IPv4 addresses. IPv10 hopes to speed the adoption to IPv6 addressing by making it more backwards compatible with IPv4 with allowing the two Internet Protocol standards to better coexist.

From the draft specification: "It solves the issue of allowing IPv6 only hosts to communicate to IPv4 only hosts and vice versa in a simple and very efficient way, especially when the communication is done using both direct IP addresses and when using hostnames between IPv10 hosts, as there is no need for protocol translations or getting the DNS involved in the communication process more than its normal address resolution function. IPv10 allows hosts from two IP versions (IPv4 and IPv6) to be able to communicate, and this can be accomplished by having an IPv10 packet containing a mixture of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in the same IP packet header."

IPv10 is the proposed name as IPv10 = IPv4 + IPv6. The draft specification can be found at IETF.org and will expire in March 2018.