Internet2 Gurus Deploy
New Protocol; VoIPv6 is Born

If the tunnel is Internet2, then the light at the end of the tunnel is IPv6. New land speed record proves that native IPv6 service stands ready to meet current and emerging needs of high performance networking.

by Jim Thompson [October 4, 2002]

When the brain trust behind the Internet2 program speaks, anybody who sees the Internet as part of their future, better listen. These are the people who are laying the groundwork for tomorrow's Internet today—right now, they're talking about Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). The group's latest innovations include deploying IPv6 across the Abilene backbone network and developing what may become the killer app for the next generation protocol—Voice over IPv6 (VoIPv6).

Led by more than 200 U.S. universities, working with industry and government, Internet2 engineers are developing and deploying advanced network applications and technologies that will be the foundation of the public data highway of tomorrow. It was many of these same people who fostered the Internet as we know it today from its infancy. If anyone knows what's hot for the future, it's these people. According to members of the Internet2 group, IPv6 is not only the wave of the future—it's the only way for new networks to fly.

Abilene deployment
The deployment of IPv6 over the nationwide Abilene backbone networks makes high-performance IPv6 service available to Internet2 member institutions and thousands of other research and education institutions across the country that have access to Abilene. Abilene's native IPv6 service also complements existing IPv6 deployment over other research and education networks around the world, such as the Energy Sciences Network in the U.S., knows as Esnet, Renater in France, and SURFnet in the Netherlands.

"We believe the deployment of IPv6 could be critical to sustaining the scalable growth and innovation that has distinguished the Internet's development over the past 30 years," said Steve Corbató, director of backbone network initiatives for Internet2.

Running on Cisco System's premier Internet router, the 12000 series, the Abilene experiment marks the first large scale deployment of native IPv6 in the U.S.

IPv6 provides a number of significant improvements over IPv4, including 128-bit long Internet addresses instead of the 32-bit addresses of IPv4 which vastly increases the number of available addresses and paves the way for a large range of new applications.

It also opens the door to higher speeds, as evidenced by a new Internet2 Land Speed Record (I2-LSR) set this month using IPv6 by the University of Oregon, the Oregon Gigapop and NYSERNet working with the staff of Abilene.

Land speed record
In the open competition, 3.47 gigabytes of information was transferred over 3,000 miles (4,810 km) of network from Eugene, Oregon to Syracuse, New York in one hour. This established a new I2-LSR IPv6 category record of 39.81 terabit meters per second.

"There's no question that routine delivery of real-world production information services of this sort is the best tangible proof that native IPv6 service stands ready to meet the current and emerging needs of the higher education high performance networking community," noted Joanne Hugi, associate vice president, Information Services at the University of Oregon.

Tim Lance, president of NYSERNet added that the IPv6 deployment across the Abilene backbone network is "approaching the same performance as the IPv4 network" and establishes a transcontinental network supporting IPv4 and IPv6 over the same infrastructure.

"[The Internet2 Land Speed Record] provides an important demonstration of IPv6's readiness to support day-to-day network applications," said Rich Carlson, network research scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, and chair of the I2-LSR judging panel.

IPv6 speaks up
The ultimate development and widespread deployment of IPv6 was given a further push with the announcement of support for the next generation protocol in Java2, standard edition 1.4.1 from Sun Microsystems, Inc. This addition paved the way for the development of a VoIPv6 application by the Swiss company, Telscom.

Based on Session Initiated Protocol (SIP) and called 6VOICE, the application uses IPv6 in a native mode which means it's the only transmission protocol and not embedded or tunneled through the present Internet. "With the successful deployment of VoIPv6 application, we are seeing the end of the dark tunnel and finding the bright light and business models of next generation networks based on IPv6 protocol," said Telscom managing director, Dr. Sathya Rao.

A successful test of the voice application was conducted using Linux systems for both fixed and Mobile IPv6 networks. Documentation and the application software is available to research groups from Telscom free of charge. If you are interested in the 6VOICE project, you should contact Dr. Rao directly.

For the time being, the Abilene network is running the old and new protocols side by side. Networking experts expect the old and new IP protocols will coexist for some time until people stop using IPv4 and migrate entirely to IPv6. Nobody knows for certain when this day will come—but Internet2 will be ready for it.

—End