Testing and Verifying an IPv6 Based Multicast Network

Today we are witnessing the widespread introduction of the triple play service. The main television broadcasting companies start, or plan to start, their IPTV services. The current data network infrastructure and the unicast communication paradigm are not effective for providing such services. The multicast data communication paradigm is as old as the World Wide Web but, even so, it has no wide acceptance or deployment. With IPTV this situation may change. Due to the small address space IPv4 cannot provide the necessary support for multicast communication. It may happen that multicast will be the main driving force behind the widespread use of the IPv6 protocol. With the IPv6 multicast network there will be many new protocols and implementations. The testing of these implementations is not easy without protocol validation tools and, unfortunately, we were not able to find a freely available framework on the net for protocol validation. Testing an already deployed network can provide valuable information about future situations and services. System administrators need a framework that can also supply them with traffic orchestration and measurement data. We were not able to find a framework that was easy to use and would allow us to create a distributed orchestrated testing procedure for an arbitrary network with arbitrary protocols. These were some of the reasons for setting up our NetSpotter project. Here we will show the architecture and the services our framework currently offers. Then we will also present our measurements of a Linux IPv6 PIM-SM implementation called MRD6