BCNETwork News
 
December 2005

ADOPTON OF IPv6 POSTIONS BCNET IN LEAGUE WITH LEADING-EDGE INTERNATIONAL NETWORKS

In 2003, a leading Japanese financial newspaper reported that Japan, China and South Korea claimed to be determined to become the leading nations in Internet technology, which would take the form of jointly developing IPv6 and completely adopting IPv6 starting in 2005. Thus begging the question: why does leading the pack in Internet technology require adopting IPv6? And how has BCNET responded to this transition?

BCNET is IPv6 Ready

Today, BCNET is IPv6 ready. Three of BCNET’s Transit Exchanges will support IPv6: Vancouver, Victoria and Prince George. This ability to support IPv6 positions BCNET in line with other research networks around the world that are shifting toward a complete next-generation network architecture.

Support for IPv6 enables easy and direct collaboration and cooperation between BCNET and other networks throughout the US, Asia and Australia – which meets the research-related demand from BCNET member institutions to peer with colleagues in these countries. In addition to the ability for researchers using BCNET to effectively collaborate with colleagues in emerging nations, IPv6 will improve the network’s ability to accommodate direct connection with distributed computing clusters and will ensure that as the number of devices in use on BCNET member campuses increases, BCNET’s own allocation of IP addresses will not be depleted.

IP: The Next Generation

IPv6, short for Internet Protocol version 6, is not new technology. First introduced as Internet Protocol Next-Generation, IPv6 was adopted by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 1994. The IETF is a group of engineers that assess and develop the core protocols of the Internet by reviewing and testing specifications and publishing the results to be used in the creation of network architecture. For all intensive purposes, they can be considered the earliest of early adopters; meaning that for over 10 years, IPv6 has failed to proliferate to common usage. However, according to Brian Fitzgerald, Network Analyst with the University of Victoria, IPv6 is still fairly young for a protocol. “There is still a lot of discussion surrounding its implementation,” he says. “To put it in perspective, Internet Protocol address allocation is currently a hot topic on the agenda at the United Nations-sponsored World Summit on Information Society.”

What all the Fuss is About

In very simple terms, Internet Protocol is a method by which data is communicated across an inter-network. The concept of an IP address is probably the most commonly known aspect of the Internet Protocol; each computer has at least one IP address that uniquely identifies it from all other computers on the Internet. The modern Internet primarily uses IPv4, which was the first version of the Internet Protocol to be widely deployed. As such, it was created in a time when the number of devices accessing the Internet was significantly smaller than the number today.

IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses, limiting it to just over 4 billion unique addresses. This may seem like a lot, but consider the fact that the world’s population is just under 6.5 billion people; although many of these people are living in conditions where there is no Internet access, often inhabitants of industrialized nations are able to purchase numerous appliances and mobile devices that each need unique IP addresses. As the number of addresses available is consumed, an IPv4 address shortage is inevitable in the long run.

IPv6 was inspired to resolve the concern of IPv4 address exhaustion, but is also useful for mobility, quality of service, privacy extension and so forth; it was designed to allow the Internet to grow steadily, while also improving its ability to support newer and more advanced applications. As opposed to 32-bit addresses, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, which allows for the supply of 340 undecillion unique addresses. In other words, assuming a population of approximately 6.5 billion humans, there are enough IPv6 addresses such that every atom of every person on Earth could be assigned 7 unique addresses, with enough to spare. As Fitzgerald explains, “A greater amount of IP addresses through IPv6 has implications for the use of rapidly growing networks, such as those that are currently developing in Asia. In addition, IPv6 significantly improves the management of computing clusters and can enable the use of a multiplicity of addresses for a single machine; for example, a different address could be linked to a specific role or service.”