Next generation Internet Protocol-testbed experience

IPv6 is the next generation Internet Protocol designed to replace the widely used "classical" TCP/IP. IPv6 offers a solution to the address space exhaustion and router table bloat that has caused fears of meltdown as the growth of the Internet has continued to accelerate. IPv6 also offers features of interest to the military community such as security, autoconfiguration, richer addressing schemes and improved support for quality of service and multicasting, which make it an attractive COTS upgrade path both to systems using classical TCP/IP and systems using other networking protocols. This paper presents an assessment of the current status of the IPv6 technology from work in the NATO C3 Agency on emerging Internet technologies of interest to NATO. The major router and UNIX vendors have beta releases offering IPv6 support, whilst both Microsoft beta and commercial third party solutions are available for the Microsoft Windows platform. Some parts of the IPv6 protocol specification have matured faster than others, and some features of particular interest to the military community are not yet fully specified and hence not implemented. Applications which utilise the new features of IPv6 are not yet available. Furthermore the gap left by the lack of a version of IPv6 from Microsoft for the widely used Windows platform has not been fully filled by IPv6 capable stacks from third party vendors as some Windows applications require the use of a genuine Microsoft stack. The current beta version by Microsoft of IPv6 for Windows NT, whilst useful for testing purposes, is not a supported product.