\chapter{\label{summary}Conclusion and Outlook} %** Summary.tex: What have you achieved, what have you presented in this % document. What are the highlights of your work. % It should conclude by a conclusion. % Intro The objective of implementing high speed NAT64 in P4 has been achieved. % our implementation! Our implementation has been shown to be portable between 2 different P4 targets and we expect it to be portable to other P4 targets, potentially at much higher speeds. Our in-network solution allows novel translations without involving external routers.\footnote{Compare figures \ref{fig:v6v4standard} and \ref{fig:v6v4mixed}.} We expect this to support migration to IPv6 only networks. % P4 P4 has been proven to us as a suitable programming language for network equipment and we think it has great potential for solving new and existing problems at line rates. However, in the current state the tooling and frameworks are still immature and need significant work to become usable for solving day-to-day challenges or supporting large scale projects. Even with the current state drawbacks, P4 is a very convincing language that has wide range of applications due to its protocol independence and easy to understand architecture. The availability of protocol independent programmable network equipment opens up many possibilities for in-network programming. While this thesis focused on NAT64, the accompanying technology DNS64 could also be implemented in P4, thus completing the translation mechanism. % NetPFGA In our opinion, the P4/NetFPGA platform is a good showcase for the capabilities of P4, demonstrating near line speed P4 programs with good capabilities of demonstrating scientific research. However, the supporting code toolchain shows strong weaknesses that render productive deployments difficult. % ---------------------------------------------------------------------- % Outlook While the project concluded successfully, we see possible improvements to our work as well to the used toolchains. % Implementation The implementation of our algorithm uses the IPv4-Compatible IPv6 Address defined in RFC4291 to embed IPv4 addresses. However RFC6052 defines different embeddings depending on the prefix size. A future version should not only support more flexible embeddings, but also consider more in depth translation like ICMP/ICMP6 specifics. % P4 The P4 language has shown maturity, but the usability and ease of use of the provided toolchains can be significantly improved. Additionally, we envision a stronger tie between the different tools in the P4 environment, like a collection of libraries and modules that could form something on the line of a ``P4OS''. This operating system could spawn over network switches with P4, provide a coherent library and define data definitions that can be used in various programming languages bindings. % NetFPGA The NetFPGA, from the hardware point of view, is a very interesting hardware platform. Reducing the difficulties we experienced with the surrounding toolchain and making development experience more consistent has the potential to not only make NetFPGA, but also the whole set of P4 hardware more interesting for developers. %% PMTU %% handling error cases %% No fragmentation %% No address / mac learning %% session handling