The Promise of IPv6:More Than Just Extra IP Addresses

The number of IP addresses and current routing schemes cannot accommodate next-generation applications in a client-server and peer-to-peer global environment.

IPv6, as a 128-bit protocol, is supposed to quadruple the number of available IP addresses-enough so that each individual on the planet could be assigned thousands of addresses.

As it stands now, under IPv4, MIT alone possesses a class A address, which provides almost twice as many addresses as the entire People's Republic of China. So, why worry?

Even though approximately half the IPv4 space is unallocated today, it will quickly dwindle as prodigious numbers of Internet devices (such as mobile phones, cars and residential servers) will heavily burden NATs (Network Address Translations) under IPv4 (see "Making the Transition," below).

Rather than trying to improve on the functionality of NATS, IETF's NGTrans Working Group and Cisco's IOS Technologies believe that "doing one big thing"-moving to IPv6-will be less arduous than making constant changes to NATs under IPv4.

ISPs "are likely to use rude names in the context of 'supporters of IPv6' and tell you it will never happen," says Fred Baker, chairman for IETF, which has various working groups (NGTrans, TACIT and NOSI) working to ensure that the base specification provides the facilities required for the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. "They are working on other problems and don't see a need to solve this one."

Most U.S. network administrators, router vendors, host vendors, ISPs and protocol engineers maintain that IPv4 is sufficient for their needs, at the present time. In Asia and Europe, however, address scaling issues are seen as critical where 3G already is standard. Those countries anticipate that there will be billions of IPv6-capable devices populating the Internet someday, and have made IPv6 a mandatory network layer protocol for 3GPP, 3GPP2 and MWIF.

"In Europe, IPv6 is a political issue. The EU would like to see a rebalancing of IP address allocations for essentially political reasons. In their view, the guy with the most IP addresses has considerable economic clout," notes Baker.

Taking these factors into consideration, companies are starting to evaluate IPv6.

"We, for one, want to be able to respond to any trends that surface. Not only will phones and PDAs require IP addresses, but so, too, will refrigerators, washing machines and other equipment," says Raanan Grinwald, product manager of billing systems for Mind CTI.

"All these devices could have IP addresses that enable them to connect to networks, so people will control them through the Internet," Grinwald says. With next-generation billing in mind, he says Mind CTI will move to more device-dependent billing as more equipment connects to networks.

"We will concentrate on IPv6 enablement at the architecture level, and by 2001, we expect to have systems running on an IPv6 infrastructure," Grinwald says. He predicts IPv6 will pick up momentum and be in the testing phases by 2002. "Any software related to IP billing must support IPv6 in a year and a half or so. You have to start thinking about it now if you don't want to get caught with your guard down," he says. "It's somewhat analogous, although on a smaller scale, to Y2k. We will have to be ready for the time when customers ask us if we can handle IPv6. We will be a testing bed, testing networks for every user [equipment and application vendors] that wants to test software they connect to our network."

Device-dependent billing will require that each piece of equipment connecting to a network possess varying billing parameters. "We will have to be able to differentiate between usage and the type of equipment that facilitated that usage," Grinwald explains. "QoS will be a much more prevalent usage parameter in the rating of the profile of the customer at level four. With IPv6, implementing QoS will be more straightforward. It will enable customers to require an SLA from their providers, and get better support for it at the IP level. The billing systems, in turn, should be able to fully support SLA management, rating and special discounts if the SLAs are not fulfilled.

"As a result, billing and rating services will have better parameters for billing for QoS. It will be an integral part of low-level IP protocols; hence QoS will be easier to achieve for customers. It will be easier for people to use this feature and provide functionality down to the lower level of their equipment," says Grinwald.

Since companies in the billing space will have to be able to handle the new capabilities and built-in service options introduced by IPv6, changes will need to take place within the software and the database fields that occupy addresses. Currently, IP addresses are defined as four groups of digits separated by dots. With IPv6, there will be a need for five times the number of digits when entering an IP address.

As for billing and customer care applications, don't expect changes to be plug-and-play.

"The transition will be interesting," says Jim Yu, director of new technology for ITXC, a leading wholesale VoIP provider. "There's a lot of network infrastructure in place, so it will take a lot of time to upgrade to v6. If applications are coded with a set of IP addresses or schema under v4, it will take some work-there will be ramifications in network and application senses."

Several different areas will demand attention, including changing internal software to handle new IP addresses, as well as mediation and third-party mediation components.

Making the Transition

Of major importance during the development of IPv6 will be the transition away from IPv4. The IETF expects to make IPv6 backward-compatible by specifiying basic transition mechanisms for IPv6 hosts and routers. The NGTrans working group is attempting to get IPv4 islands to speak across IPv6 networks by defining tools to ease the IPv6 integration and co-existence (see http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/ngtrans-charter.html).

As stated in the charter, the use of a dual IP layer in IPv6 will support both IPv4 and IPv6 in hosts and routers. Where there is no native IPv6 service, connectivity between end user sites will be achieved through encapsulation (tunneling) between them. The "6-to-4" transition mechanism specifies a routing prefix. When using an IPv4 NAT, 6-to-4 mechanisms remain valid, and the NAT device includes a fully functional IPv6 router with the 6-to-4 mechanism included.

Under IPv4, information such as an IP address, DNS server, default router and other configuration details are often installed at each network node, in many cases by manual configuration. With IPv6, efforts are underway to shift this administrative load onto departmental servers.

Networks configured with DHCP-Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, which dynamically configures IP addresses-will have a simplified transition compared to non-DHCP networks with their fixed IP addresses, notes James Morehead, senior manager for wireless Internet market development at Portal Software. He notes that both DHCP and non-DHCP networks would require changes in behind-the-scenes elements, including routers, protocol stacks, servers and IP mediators.

"As it relates to retraining network engineers, we don't expect this would have a great impact on Portal Software but may affect our customers as they migrate to the change," says Morehead. "We do not believe there will be major changes required in our next-generation billing and customer management platform [Infranet] to support IPv6. The structural changes in IPv6 to support more IP addresses are effectively transparent to Infranet, since IP addresses are 'pattern-matched' against a stored value."

Morehead notes that Portal Software has partnerships with the major players who will enable the deployment of IPv6. "As part of our business model, we have built a strong alliances team to ensure we are coordinated with partner activities and advancements," he says. "3G architectures are primarily built around IPv6, and given the strategic importance of 3G upgrades for major carriers globally, this may serve as the key application to drive IPv6 adoption."

One aspect of IPv6 Morehead expects might change within the system is the attributes stored with the service instance. "As these attributes change," he says, "we can simply add new fields to the service object to store them. This is one of the benefits of having an object model that is exposed and easily extended."

What They Are Saying

As providers of customer management and billing software designed for the Internet, Portal and other vendors will watch closely to gauge IPv6 acceptance. If it's not widely deployed, there will be problems with routing. And no one is expecting the conversion to happen overnight.

Cisco

"The difficulty is exacerbated by the fact no one will deploy an IPv6 network if there is no application," notes Patrick Grossetete, IOS IPv6 product manager in the IOS Technologies Division (ITD) at Cisco Systems. "It is a typical chicken-egg issue, as IPv6 applications require an IPv6 infrastructure. An IPv6 network won't be deployed without a business need." Cisco has been offering IOS IPv6 beta software to its customers for three years.

According to Grossetete, Cisco is attempting to take a proactive approach by including IPv6 protocol support as part of its IOS software release 12.2(1)T, scheduled for the first quarter of 2001. "This differs from our beta software in that it will enable companies to move into production," he notes. Additionally, Cisco is offering training in IPv6 protocols and IOS configuration. "As soon as the need to go to IPv6 is there, ISPs will have to invest in training, inventory and planning."

ITXC

"We are looking into IPv6, but not aggressively implementing it. No customer or vendor has come in and said 'we need IPv6,' " says Yu of ITXC, which is active in ITU and ETSI standards bodies, as well as IMTC (the International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium), an industry body for the VoIP space. Yu thinks it is inevitable that the industry will embrace IPv6, now that it has been ratified by the ITU. "We are waiting for equipment vendors to implement IPv6. Once the equipment is readily available and field tested for network providers to evaluate, the comfort level will build, and IPv6 will propagate into infrastructure here in the U.S."

Sprint

"For us, IPv6 adoption will be customer-driven. We think getting IP to cell phone applications looks promising," says Rob Rockell, principal engineer for Sprint, which offers free 6Bone connectivity to its customer base. 6Bone is a worldwide network for IPv6 testing and preproduction that has reached approximately 400 sites and networks in 40 countries. "I'm sure IPv6 will take off once cell phones begin to eat up IP addresses. For now, we're playing with different aspects beyond mobility, although mobile IP is getting a lot of attention."

Level 3

As a "carrier's carrier"-a large commercial network that sells to service providers, who then cater to the consumers of bandwidth-Level 3 does not yet regard IPv6 as a requirement. "We don't run IPv6, but we are evaluating it now," notes David Samuels, senior director for global IP services at Level 3. Because Internet 2 is running IPv6 in certain portions, he says, Level 3 "is keeping an eye on it." According to Samuels, "Level 3 realizes that if our service providers' customers run IPv6, it will have to interoperate with our platform. We can do so currently through ZAMA Networks" (http://www.zama.net).

"We will continue to look at customers that have IPv6 compatibility and stay abreast of what Cisco is doing, since they pretty much make up the entire enterprise. It will happen as fast as their customers upgrade routers and equipment," says Samuels, who believes momentum will pick up in a year or so.

Leading the IPv6 Charge

It will be up to the likes of Cisco, Nortel, Lucent and Juniper to build next-gen routers. "If anyone is going to influence and change infrastructure," Baker says, "it will be those who can make the main changes in the hardware, routers and embedded software."

Cisco routers handle the majority of Internet traffic, and as a result their product evolution will be a major element in the transition to IPv6. Some IPv6 efforts to note are Nokia's 3G All-IP Core network strategy, and NTT DoCoMo, which has proposed an IPv6-based architecture. More than 50 IPv6 implementations are completed or underway worldwide, and over 25 are in testing or production on 6Bone.

Standards work on IPv6 and related components is far enough along that numerous vendors have developed either prototype implementations or products. For current information on implementations and vendor activities, see the following URLS:

http://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng/html/ipng-main.html and http://www.ipv6forum.com.