BACKGROUND TO IPv6

• Benefits of IPv6
• Likely applications
• Other pointers to IPv6 adoption
• JANET IPv6 Positioning Statement

Benefits of IPv6

The most prominent reason for deploying IPv6 is its vastly increased address space, offering 128-bit addresses in place of IPv4's 32-bit addresses. While most UK Universities have sufficient address space, increased use of wireless PDAs, laptops and embedded systems will cause an increase in demand. Already some UK colleges, and some departments in universities, are running Network Address Translation (NAT) to serve a large number of networked hosts behind a small pool of public IP addresses.

Likely applications

An IPv6 infrastructure will enable the development of novel applications which simply will not work or that have high overheads in the presence of obstacles such as NAT. Applications domains that could benefit include:

• distributed systems
• GRID applications
• wireless 802.11b communities
• 3G/UMTS networks
• home networking

Staff and students will be able to work at home much more effectively with always-on broadband network access, for example making use of advanced collaborative conferencing applications or accessing home services from their office desktops. We should remember that the IPv4 killer application, the Web, was not invented until at least ten years after the Internet was available to the public. We do not yet know the ‘killer’ IPv6 application, but by promoting deployment and gaining early access to the technology, we are more likely to be ready for it to emerge.

Other pointers to IPv6 adoption

The pan-European IPv6 research network, GÉANT, is running dual stack IPv4/IPv6 and IPv6 is being implemented by national educational networks in Europe, the USA and Japan. Vendor-independent standards groups are increasingly focusing on IPv6 instead of IPv4 – for example, the bulk of the IETF's Mobile IP work is now IPv6 only.

JANET IPv6 Positioning Statement

Further details about the JANET IPv6 Positioning Statement and the support provided through the JANET IPv6 Experimental Service are available.