A. Marshall and N. Agoulmine: MMNS 2003, LNCS 2839, pp. 102–114, 2003. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2003 M3G: A Mobile Multicast Multimedia Gateway for Seamless IPv4/IPv6 Transition Yassine Hadjadj Aoul, Daniel Negru, Abdelhamid Nafaa, and Ahmed Mehaoua CNRS-PRiSM Lab., University of Versailles 45, av. des Etats Unis 78035 – Versailles - France Tel: +33 1 39 25 40 56 Fax: +33 1 39 25 40 57 {yana, dan, anaf, mea}@prism.uvsq.fr Abstract. A growing interest in third generation wireless IP network and service technologies, push up the demand on IPv6 transition. Most of these services require mobility, multicast and multimedia service supports. However, the transition to such a NG IP networks and services is slowed down because of the richness and complexity of the applications and the integration of legacy systems. Existing IETF and academic proposals permit to solve several transition problems but they don’t cope with the multimedia or wireless aspects of some next generation IP services. In the other hand, most transition solutions are limited to LANs and couldn’t scale well. Therefore, this article describes the architecture and the implementation of an integrated multi-functional IP gateway for IPv4/IPv6 network transition with multimedia, multicast and mobility service management. This gateway, named M3G, has been partially implemented and validated on a Linux-based testbed with MPEG4 video streaming applications. Nevertheless, the main goal of this work is to achieve a transparent establishment and a smooth control of unicast (e.g. VOD) and multicast (e.g. TV broadcasting) multimedia communications between heterogeneous fixed and mobile hosts belonging to dense IPv4 and IPv6 domains. 1 Introduction The transition from the former version of IP to its new shape is certainly not the least task to consider. Even though IPv6 has a strong base and is easily extensible, the migration is facing difficulties. Therefore, there is a critical need to deploy a solution that would allow IPv4 existing services to be accessed by IPv6 terminals. The solution proposed in here takes into consideration this aspect. Not only is the heterogeneous problem taken into account at all levels, but also many important features of IPv6 are exploited, from mobility to multicast, including multimedia and scalability. The fruition would be a Mobile Multicast IPv4/IPv6 Gateway for Multimedia Applications working in a heterogeneous environment. Its main role is to manage connectivity between a native IPv4 domain and a native IPv6 one, all in respect to multimedia applications constraints.