Is Global IPv6 Deployment on Track?

IPv6 has been the subject of a significant amount of research work in the networking field for more than a decade. The main aim of this paper is to discuss the current status of IPv6 deployment. It is not the aim of the authors to provide any breakthrough discovery which can boost IPv6 usage, but instead focus on what has happened in the past and what is currently limiting the IPv6 global deployment. The 6NET project [1], along with other national and international initiatives produced a vast collection of knowledge about the next generation Internet protocol. This work is still to be used massively in order to evolve the Internet into its next generation.POS_Conhecimento(ref. POSC/338/1.3/C/NAC, FEDER

Australian IPv6 Readiness: Results of a National Survey

IPv6 is the replacement for the Internet’s incumbent protocol, IPv4. Although exhaustion of the IPv4 address space is now imminent there has been no meaningful uptake of IPv6 since its standardisation in 1998. Data from a national survey of the top 1,000 IT user organisations in Australia are analysed, revealing that they have made little or no preparation for IPv6. This creates the potential for considerable disadvantage for Australian organisations. The author recommends that governments and regulatory bodies should consider regulatory or policy action to encourage the diffusion of IPv6. The author also recommends that enterprise organisations develop a long-term IPv6 strategy, implement IPv6 training programs, update their policy frameworks, and assess their IT assets and applications portfolios

The IPv6 Internet: An Assessment of Adoption and Quality of Services

The goal of this study is to deliver both an in-depth comprehensive analysis of the current state of IPv6 adoption and an assessment of the quality of services over the IPv6 Internet. Our assessment comprises an examination of eight data sets used to produce a comprehensive picture of IPv6 adoption across 12 metrics. We assessed the quality of services over the IPv6 Internet using eight globally distributed monitoring agents to compare the HTTP load times to targeted websites over IPv6 and IPv4. The results of our analysis confirm the findings of previous studies showing that IPv6 is in an accelerating adoption phase and that the IPv6 Internet is maturing in its ability to deliver quality of services on a par to IPv4. The long anticipated exhaustion of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) IPv4 global address pool occurred in February of 2011. Since that time, four of the five regional Internet registries (RIRs) have also exhausted their IPv4 address pools, leaving the African Network Information Centre as the only RIR with a pool of IPv4 addresses remaining for general allocation. As the availability of IPv4 addresses continues to diminish, the adoption and use of IPv6 is rapidly increasing. However, the quality of IPv6 deployments and implementations is not always equal, which can cause user experiences over the IPv6 Internet to suffer. For this reason, ongoing monitoring and measurement are essential to provide a comprehensive picture of IPv6 adoption and to evaluate the quality of services over IPv6

New perspectives on the IPv6 transition

Despite it being more than a decade old, and nearly two decades since the problems with IPv4 were first identified, IPv6 still has not diffused significantly through the Internet. Policies advocating market forces to promote IPv6 diffusion are widespread, and thus this paper examines IPv6 adoption from the perspectives of Hotelling's aconomics of exhaustible resources and the economics of permit markets, concluding in both cases that significant IPv6 diffusion will not occur until after the IPv4 address space is exhausted. This outcome is not desirable, and therefore new policy alternatives must be debated

Two economic perspectives on the IPv6 transition

Purpose – IPv6 is the replacement for the Internet’s incumbent protocol, IPv4. IPv6 adoption is required to allow the Internet to continue to grow; however, there has been almost no uptake since its standardisation in the late 1990s. This paper seeks to explain how this non-adoption may be a consequence of current policies paradoxically intended to promote IPv6. Design/methodology/approach – Economic theories of exhaustible resources and permit markets are used to provide an explanation for the lack of adoption of IPv6. Findings – The current policy approach will not yield a significant adoption of IPv6 until after the IPv4 address space is exhausted and may also constrain Internet growth after IPv4 exhaustion occurs. Practical implications – Current policies intended to promote IPv6 diffusion through the Internet must be reconsidered. The economics of permit markets in particular can inform discussions about IPv4 address transfer markets. Originality/value – Economic analyses of IPv6 adoption are almost non-existent and very few prior studies are known. This paper helps to rectify this important gap in the literature

IPv6 Diffusion Milestones: Assessing the Quantity and Quality of Adoption

There are currently two versions of Internet Protocol (IP) in use today, IP version 4 (IPv4) and IP version 6 (IPv6). The original version, IPv4, was standardized in the early 1980s as part of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency Internet program and became the official Internet protocol in 1983 (Kleinrock, 2010). IPv6 was standardized in 1995 as its successor to provide enhanced capabilities and address IPv4 technological limitations, most notable of which was the anticipated exhaustion of address space (Deering & Hinden, 1995). While the two protocols have some functional similarities, they are distinct and not backward compatible; IPv4-only devices cannot communicate directly with IPv6-only devices and vice-versa. Consequently, organizations wishing to take full advantage of the enhanced features of IPv6 must upgrade their entire network infrastructure and end devices to support IPv6, while at the same time maintaining IPv4 support for legacy systems that will not or cannot be upgraded. The costs and risks associated with upgrading an entire network to support a new protocol with no intrinsic return on investment has acted as a disincentive for IPv6 adoption. To be sure, the transition of the Internet to IPv6 has certainly taken a leisurely pace over the past twenty years. Given the slow pace of adoption, it is understandable that many doubted, and may still doubt that IPv6 will ever become the dominant Internet protocol and replace IPv4. However, in line with diffusion of innovations theory, it is the case with many innovations that potential adopters do not perceive any relative advantage, thus leading to a particularly slow adoption take-up rate. This is especially true with communications technologies that have high interdependence and require a critical mass of users before adoption becomes self-sustaining and rapidly accelerates (Rogers 2003). The goal of this paper is to provide empirical evidence showing that IPv6 adoption has reached critical mass and is now in a phase of accelerating adoption projected to continue. A methodology for monitoring the quality of IPv6 enablement and global IPv6 support is also provided so that the user experience over IPv6 can be assessed against the IPv4 baseline

Resilient routing in the internet

Although it is widely known that the Internet is not prone to random failures, unplanned failures due to attacks can be very damaging. This prevents many organisations from deploying beneficial operations through the Internet. In general, the data is delivered from a source to a destination via a series of routers (i.e routing path). These routers employ routing protocols to compute best paths based on routing information they possess. However, when a failure occurs, the routers must re-construct their routing tables, which may take several seconds to complete. Evidently, most losses occur during this period. IP Fast Re-Route (IPFRR), Multi-Topology (MT) routing, and overlays are examples of solutions proposed to handle network failures. These techniques alleviate the packet losses to different extents, yet none have provided optimal solutions. This thesis focuses on identifying the fundamental routing problem due to convergence process. It describes the mechanisms of each existing technique as well as its pros and cons. Furthermore, it presents new techniques for fast re-routing as follows. Enhanced Loop-Free Alternates (E-LFAs) increase the repair coverage of the existing techniques, Loop-Free Alternates (LFAs). In addition, two techniques namely, Full Fast Failure Recovery (F3R) and fast re-route using Alternate Next Hop Counters (ANHC), offer full protection against any single link failures. Nevertheless, the former technique requires significantly higher computational overheads and incurs longer backup routes. Both techniques are proved to be complete and correct while ANHC neither requires any major modifications to the traditional routing paradigm nor incurs significant overheads. Furthermore, in the presence of failures, ANHC does not jeopardise other operable parts of the network. As emerging applications require higher reliability, multiple failures scenarios cannot be ignored. Most existing fast re-route techniques are able to handle only single or dual failures cases. This thesis provides an insight on a novel approach known as Packet Re-cycling (PR), which is capable of handling any number of failures in an oriented network. That is, packets can be forwarded successfully as long as a path between a source and a destination is available. Since the Internet-based services and applications continue to advance, improving the network resilience will be a challenging research topic for the decades to come

Forwarding on Gates: A flexible and scalable inter-network layer supporting in-network functions

How to design an inter-network that is flexible regarding its features and scalable at the same time? How can such an inter-network satisfy requirements from applications and subnetworks dynamically? Can routing be more flexible and balance the wishes from end user and network operators? Is there a better world beyond current IP-networks? This book answers these questions by presenting a new architecture called "Forwarding on Gates" (FoG). It exploits the advantages of a recursive reference model and does not follow the traditional OSI reference model. FoG mixes connection-oriented and connectionless aspects dynamically in order to increase its efficiency. It enables a scalable function provisioning by a flexible distribution of states between network participants. Its routing can adjust itself to an optimal trade-off between CPU and memory usage. Moreover, FoG supports new business cases and opens up a market for network-related functions, at which function provider can offer their functions to function users.Auch im Buchhandel erhältlich: Forwarding on Gates : a flexible and scalable inter-network layer supporting in-network functions / Florian Liers Ilmenau : Univ.-Verl. Ilmenau, 2014. - XII, 258 S. ISBN 978-3-86360-094-5 URN urn:nbn:de:gbv:ilm1-2013000657 Preis (Druckausgabe): 30,80