“The Dream Network of the future requires IPv6,” said Christian Huitema, Architect of Networking and Communications for Microsoft, in a keynote address delivered at the Burton Group’s Catalyst conference in San Francisco. The vision calls for an easy-to-use, always available, secure, scalable and manageable and tightly integrated into all versions of the next generation of Windows. As a first point, Huitema acknowledged that IPv6 by itself does not solve all the security, reliability and availability problems in networking. It does, however, start to provide the bridge between all the islands of connectivity. As an example, Huitema demonstrated a children’s storybook application shared online by a mother and daughter. The mother read the story to her daughter from an airport lounge using a tablet PC connected to a WLAN. The daughter followed along using a similar tablet connected to a home WLAN. Huitema argued that the Dream Network has to be more than a conduit… it has to offer the peer-to-peer connectivity that lets the mother share the application residing on the home network. All of the most promising new PC applications, said Huitema, are based on this peer-to-peer concept. He said that IPv6 is needed because “NAT is evil.” It blocks the connectivity needed for the next wave of applications. IPv6 provides the addressing needed to support them. Huitema noted that a huge number of calls to the MSN support lines concern NAT issues. The Xbox Live network also has had to implement significant technical workarounds to solve NAT issues.
For some years, there has been a chicken-and-egg problem regarding IPv6. Huitema argued that it is not practical to wait until IPv6 networks are deployed before developing applications. Microsoft has already released IPv6 development kits for Windows XP. He listed three technologies for bridging the IPv4-to-IPv6 gap:
- 6to4 — which derives an IPv6/48 network prefix from a global IPv4 address
- Teredo — which provides automatic tunneling of IPv6 over UDP/IPv4 and works through NAT, although it may be blocked by firewalls
- ISATAP — which is a single box that can provide automatic tunneling of IPv6 over IPv4 enterprise networks. Microsoft is using such a system in its own network.
Finally, Huitema noted that Microsoft’s .NET initiative is IPv6 ready.
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