IPv6 in the Academic Enviroment

As it happened at the beginning of the Internet with the Internet Protocol version 4, IPv4, the new generation protocol IPv6, had a rapid deployment in the academic-scientific area. If we go back to the beginning of the Internet, we may note that it development was related to the Universities nets and the research centres. In this way, initiatives like NSFNET were the origin of the Internet backbone in U.S.A and protocols like the WWW were born in the CERN. Afterwards, the result of these innovations was incorporated by other areas, taking the Internet to the current state.

Regarding the Internet Protocol version 6, IPv6, it has a similar experience. It early adoption by the academic community has as an objective, on the one hand the research and experimentation and on the other hand the formation of human resources in the field. Besides, some necessities of this area get benefit from the available features in this protocol. Some of the examples are:

• The necessity of having addresses publicly available that enable the interaction between pairs (in applications peer to peer as videoconference, instruments remote operation, grids, etc.)
• Characteristics such as multicast, necessary in applications like access grid and others that require optimize the bandwidth use.
• Availability of IPSec as part of the stack, which enables the applications deployment that require security of end to end, as availability of network resources (grids).
• The new possibilities that the QoS features incorporated to the protocol provide.

For all these reasons, the current experience in the academic and research areas is vast. Particularly in Latin American and Caribbean region, the National Research and Education Nets (NRENs) and their member institutions have been using the protocol for many years. It is important to point out the available experience in RedCLARA, in which IPv6 is currently available in a native way, with almost all the NRENs connected interchanging IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes.

Guillermo Cicileo

RedCLARA IPv6 Workgroup
http://www.redclara.net/03/06_05.htm y su wiki
http://wiki-gtipv6.reuna.cl/wiki/index.php/Portada

IPv6 Internet 2 Workgroup: http://ipv6.internet2.edu/

GEANT Workgroup: http://www.join.uni-muenster.de/geantv6/

6DISS Project of the European Union that promotes the adoption of IPv6 across trainings and transfer of knowledge towards regions in development: http://www.6diss.org/

IPv6 Iris Network http://www.rediris.es/gt/iris-ipv6/index.es.html

Projects of investigation and test of IPv6 fomented by the European Commission
http://www.6net.org/ http://www.euro6ix.org/main/index.php