General IPv6 test program proposal

The envisioned production IPv6 backbone

The backbone should provide the individual NRN with an IPv6 service that is comparable with the IPv4 based service provide by DANTE today.

The current IPv4 service includes a US IP service for a subset of NRNs as well as the Inter-NRN service provide to all NRNs.

While IPv6 is a new protocol, the steps in providing a backbone service is very similar to those one needs to follow in order to provide an IPv4 backbone service. The plan is therefore to the extend possible to reuse the existing IPv4 plan, and only provide detailed comments when IPv6 issues needs to be considered. An overall picture of the IPv6 backbone and comments are provided below.
 
 


Figure 1: Overall view of the IPv6 Backbone.


 



Proposed Backbone topology

The proposed IPv6 backbone is based on a single router, capable of running IPv6 over ATM. Each participant in the experiment are then connected to the router using a PVC with endpoints in the central router and in equipment controlled by the individual participant.

Given the participants list and the TEN-155 topology in general, the most logical placement of a central router would be in the TEN-155 DE POP or secondly the TEN-155 NL POP. Operations at DANTE have indicated that the router will be placed into the NL POP, this placement allows for several different topologies to be use. Figure 2 depicts the different physical link that could be utilized.
 
 




 
 

Figure 2: The links within the backbone over which PVC's for the IPv6 experiments could be allocated.


 






The selection of the specific links that will carry the PVC's could be done with regards to utilization of the links by the production service, thereby minimizing the chance of saturation of links and the inconvenience caused hereby.  The actual selection will be performed by DANTE operations.

For the participants from ES, NO and DK it will not be possible to establish ATM PVC's as the ATM infrastructure are either not provide or delivered. A possible solution could be to use IPv6-in-v4 tunnels to the central router as currently use throughout the 6BONE. It is foreseen that control of traffic utilization by the tunnels will be difficult, if not impossible.

It is expected that PVC's of anything from .5 to 2 Mbps will be sufficient for the tests, as the tests do not focus on performance, but on providing native IPv6 connectivity. Longer running time of the tests will in general be preferred over more bandwidth.
 

IP Routing

The backbone is configured as one AS and peering with NRN's are done through BGP, EBGP between NRN and DANTE and IBGP between the DANTE edge routers. For routing internal in the backbone, several possibilities exists:
  1. OSPFng
  2. RIPng
  3. Static routing
The routing protocols are listed after preference, OSPFng is currently only offered by one router vendor, while RIPng is offered by several vendors. Internal and external routing will be examined as part of the tests.
 

Connectivity

Between TEN-155 and NRN

Connectivity to the backbone router should be provide using native IPv6 over ATM (PVC) as well as IPv6-in-IPv4 tunneling, with the backbone router as tunnel end-point. This will allow NRN without an fully deployed IPv6 infrastructure to make use the IPv6 service more easy and efficiently.

Inside TEN-155

The connectivity between the backbone routers should be based on IPv6 over ATM (SVC).