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Recent Internet2 Land Speed Records Show that IPv6 is Almost on Par With IPv4TMCnet Associate Editor Are you ready to jump into the IPv6 pool?
In another two years, you may have no choice but to jump in with everyone else. Internet2, a consortium of more than 200 universities working with industry and government to develop new Internet technologies, announced yesterday that an international team led by the University of Tokyo has set new Internet2 Land Speed Records (I2-LSR) in both the IPv6 and IPv4 single and multi-stream categories. The I2-LSR is an open competition to see who can send data at the fastest rate and for the longest distance over multiple networks. This marks the fourth time that a team from the University of Tokyo has won the competition. For the IPv4 record, the University of Tokyo team, working with the WIDE Project, Microsoft Corp., Pacific Northwest Gigapop, JGN2 and other institutions, collaborated to create a network path more 30,000 kilometers long and crossing eight international networks. According to a news release, the team successfully transferred data at a rate of 7.99 Gbps which is equal to 239,820 terabit-meters per second (Tb-m/s). For the IPv6 record, the University of Tokyo team, working with the WIDE Project, Pacific Northwest Gigapop, JGN2, Chelsio Communications and other institutions, created a path more than 30,000 kilometers long and crossing five international networks. The team transferred data at a rate of 6.18 Gbps, achieving a mark of 185,400 terabit-meters per second (Tb-m/s) - 10.75 percent more than the previous IPv6 record. Dr. Kei Hiraki, professor at the University of Tokyo and LSR team leader said the IPv6 record is a strong indication “that the performance of IPv6 is almost on par with IPv4.” “For researchers and scientists around the world, this is a positive indication that IPv6 is now ready to be used in prime time for their high-performance applications,” Dr. Hiraki said in the news release. As a result of the Internet’s explosive growth in recent years, the world is running out of IP addresses. To solve this, IPv6 is being developed to replace the current protocol. Upgrading to IPv6 will not only make approximately 3.4 trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion new addresses available, it will also enable thousands of new operational applications and business opportunities. IPv6, which promises to deliver improved security, scale and reliability for all networking, is already in use in China, as well as in other regions in Asia and Europe. However, the United States is largely viewed as lagging in IPv6 adoption. To help speed adoption here, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget has mandated that all federal agencies must start employing the new protocol on their network backbones by 2008. As of December 2005, IPv6 accounted for only a tiny percentage of the live addresses in the publicly-accessible Internet. The slow adoption rate is mostly due to the introduction of network address translation (NAT), which partially alleviates address exhaustion. But, as the Internet becomes increasingly congested with voice and video packets, NAT will no longer be able to take up the slack. Thus, the U.S. and the rest of the IPv4 world will have no choice but to migrate to IPv6 (it’s either that or suffer economically). As the development of next generation mobile communications continues, and as service providers continue to roll out next generation services such as IPTV and VoIP, adoption of IPv6 is all but inevitable. IPv6 solves the problem of limited bandwidth, which means network operators won’t need to make major upgrades to their networks. Also, because IPv6 facilitates true end-to-end connectivity, its adoption means that upside speeds will no longer be constrained. In fact, China has already deployed fiber networks providing speeds of 2.5 Gigabits from end to end. For more information about the Internet2 Land Speed Records visit http://data-reservoir.adm.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/lsr-20051110/ (for the IPv4 record) or http://data-reservoir.adm.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/lsr-20051112/ (for the IPv6 record). Additional details are available at http://lsr.internet2.edu/. Patrick Barnard is Associate Editor for TMCnet and a columnist covering the telecom industry. To see more of his articles, please visit Patrick Barnard’s columnist page. |