The success of China’s IPv6 network for the Beijing Olympics may give other organisations the confidence they need to migrate from IPv4.
Last summer’s Beijing Olympics not only showcased the talents of the athletes, it also demonstrated how version 6 of the Internet Protocol (IPv6) can lay the foundation for next generation Internet connectivity that is able to link huge numbers of innovative Web-enabled devices and services. IPv6 also addresses a range of issues impinging on the viability of it predecessors, most prominently perhaps the question of Internet address availability.
As a rapidly-developing country with a population of approximately 1.3 billion people, China is more concerned than most nations about the dwindling pool of IPv4 addresses that is available to its businesses and citizens.
Though it included an element of political breast-beating, the Chinese government’s Next Generation Internet Project (CNGI) was deliberately conceived and implemented in time for the Olympic Games.
It built an IPv6 network on fixed and mobile broadband technology to support high-definition online video delivery, and simultaneous coverage of the sporting events held at the 37 different venues – each of which also had lighting, security, and thermostat systems attached to the Web using IPv6 addressing.
The most obvious IPv6 benefit is that it provides around 3.4 x 1038 static IP addresses – this is more than there are grains of sands on the world’s beaches, according to some informed estimates.
But it is the diversity of devices, everything from earthquake and environmental monitoring systems, sensors in car windscreen wipers devised to measure rainfall, and always-attached PDAs able to roam GSM, Wi-Fi, 3G, and Bluetooth networks without dropping the IP address, that also appeal. And, of course, at the same time the number of computers demanding IP addresses is rising exponentially as more people go online.
While nations like China, Japan, and the US are taking the lead, the rest of the world has not been as speedy in migrating to the new 32-bit addressing scheme.
“In some cases there are government mandates to say ‘we will move to IPv6, and solve the problem’,” says David Holder, chairman of the IPv6 Taskforce in Scotland and managing director of UK IPv6 training and consultancy firm, Erion, “but in other places people are rather reluctant to do that.”
Holder sees wait-and-see inertia as one of the main underlying reasons for this reluctance: “In the UK, people have put their head in the sand and so far ignored the requirement,” he believes, “but there will be a rapid increase in the price of IPv4 address blocks once the central pool runs out.” When will that be? “Maybe next year [2009], but almost certainly by 2010,” Holder adds.
Experts say the Beijing Olympic Games will help to persuade more companies, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and telcos to adopt IPv6. Many are waiting to see a critical mass of successful implementations, and higher customer demand for IPv6 addresses, before taking the plunge themselves.
Owen Cole, technical director UK and Ireland for router manufacturer F5, says that he has seen a few IPv6 migration projects and trials in the UK. But these have all been in closed networks like the NHS or academic environments, rather than Internet and Web-facing business systems where downtime is critical.
“The average enterprise wants to see the technology deployed and proven before they do it themselves,” Cole says. “It is not necessarily a lack of desire, more because [migrating to IPv6] is such a massive project for them, combined with the cost of training and disruption.”
The main concern is the integration of IPv6 and IPv4 together, feels Cole – no organisation wants to migrate wholesale to IPv6, and risk being unable to access systems based on IPv4.
“The problem is that IPv6 and IPv4 are not Network Allocation Table (NAT) interchangeable, so a router on an IPv6 network will not talk to anything on an IPv4 network, and a lot of things are not going to work unless you put in a controller that can actually do the translation between the two,” he explains.
Other than the cost of training network staff to understand IPv6, migrating to the new addressing scheme should not incur too much expense, depending on the routers and operating systems in situ.
Most new routers purchased in the last three or four years already support IPv6 and IPv4, while others might require a memory of flash upgrade to add the same functionality. From Windows XP upwards, Microsoft operating systems support IPv6 by default, as do the more recent versions of Open Source equivalents, such as Linux and Unix.
This situation has taken us to the brink of where there could be a major problem, warns Holder, who says there is already a ‘black market’ in static IPv4 address blocks created by people selling addresses for profit. “The idea was that people would have already transitioned to IPv6 over the last five years, but that has not happened meaning that migration is now more painful.”
As more organisations move to IPv6, however, they could hand back their IPv4 allocation to ICANN – thereby extending the pool for a few more years, while moves are also afoot to free up reserved or unavailable IPv4 blocks for individual usage. At best though, these strategies are only likely to stem the tide, given the huge number of people and devices set to come online in parallel with the growing economies of developing countries like China, India, and others in Asia and South America.
No global organisation can risk being unable to communicate with its peers, partners or customers, and should plan for IPv6 migration in case the worst predictions about imminent IPv4 address exhaustion turn out to be true.
Existing operating systems should be checked to see if they are compatible with IPv4 and IPv6, and relevant networking specialists instructed in the configuration changes that IPv6 will bring.
http://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng/html
www.ipv6taskforce-scotland.org.uk
http://kn.theiet.org/communities/itmanagement/index.cfm
http://kn.theiet.org/communities/communications/index.cfm
IPv6 quadruples the number of network address bits from 32 bits (in IPv4) to 128 bits, or 3.4 x 1038 addressable nodes, which provides more than enough globally unique IP addresses for every network device on the planet.
The IPv6 packet is composed of two main parts: the header (at the top), and the payload (see diagram, right).
The header is in the first 40 octets (320 bits) of the packet and contains:
1 Version – version 6 (4-bit IP version).
2 Traffic class – packet priority (8 bits). Priority values subdivide into ranges: traffic where the source provides congestion control and non-congestion control traffic.
3 Flow label – quality of service (QoS) management (20 bits). Originally created for giving real-time applications special service, but currently unused.
4 Payload length – payload length in bytes (16 bits). When cleared to zero, the option is a ‘Jumbo payload’ (hop-by-hop).
5 Next header – specifies the next encapsulated protocol. The values are compatible with those specified for the IPv4 protocol field (8 bits).
6 Hop limit – replaces the TTL (time to live) field of IPv4 (8 bits). TTL is a limit on the period of time or number of iterations or transmissions in computer and computer network technology that a unit of data (for example a packet) can experience before it should be discarded.
7 Source and destination addresses – 128 bits each.
IPv6’s payload can have a size of up to 64 Kibibyte KiB (kilo binary byte) in standard mode, or larger with a ‘jumbo payload’ option. Fragmentation is handled only in the sending host in IPv6: routers never fragment a packet, and hosts are expected to use PMTU discovery (path maximum transmission unit).The protocol field of IPv4 is replaced with a Next Header field. This field usually specifies the transport layer protocol used by a packet’s payload.
In the presence of options, however, the Next Header field specifies the presence of an extra options header, which then follows the IPv6 header; the payload’s protocol itself is specified in a field of the options header. This insertion of an extra header to carry options is analogous to the handling of authetication heading (AH) and encapsulating security payload (ESP) in Ipsec (Internet Protocol Security – a suite of protocols for securing Internet Protocol (IP) communications by authenticating and encrypting each IP packet of a data stream) for both IPv4 and IPv6.
(Sources: Cisco; Information Sciences Institute; IPV6.com; Wikipedia.)
North America has roughly 50 per cent of the currently assigned IP addresses (the 27 per cent that is directly assigned to it, plus the 16 per cent of legacy assignments, most of which are to US-based organisations). Africa and South America combined have less than 5 per cent.
(Source: Derek Morr, ‘Living with IPv6’, June 2008.)
Roughly 85 per cent of IPv4 addresses are already in use, according to estimates by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). Both the European Commission (EC) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have recently called for member states to move to IPv6 as a matter of some urgency.
“In the short-term, businesses and public authorities might be tempted to try to squeeze their needs into the strait jacket of the old system, but this would mean Europe is badly placed to take advantage of the latest Internet technology, and could face a crisis when the old system runs out of addresses,” declared EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Viviane Reding (right), earlier this year (2008).
“If Europeans are to use the latest Internet devices such as smart RFID tags in shops, factories, and airports, intelligent heating and lighting systems that save energy, and in-car networks and navigation systems, then we already face a thousand-fold increase in demand for IP addresses.”
In the same statement, Reding called upon Member States to “make sure that public authorities and industry have IPv6 widely sewn up by the year 2010”.
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