The North American IPv6 Task Force, a sub-chapter of the IPv6 Forum and dedicated to the advancement and propagation of IPv6 in the North American continent, completed the second phase of testing on Moonv6, the world’s largest multi-vendor IPv6 network. The completion of Moonv6 phase II formally launches the network as a native IPv6 backbone available for network peering worldwide.
Moonv6 phase II, which ran March 7 – 19, 2004 and stretches from Durham, N.H. to California, successfully tested the following: QoS, Firewalls, Mobile IPv6, DNS and routing and border protocols OSPF, BGP and IS-IS. High-level Moonv6 results included:
- QoS: Quality of service functionality was demonstrated, proving that IPv6 is capable of allowing different classes of traffic to maintain different priorities. This allows networks to give important phone calls or video streams, for example, priority over routine file transfers or e-mail.
- Security: Moonv6 phase II demonstrated that basic firewall and stateful firewall technology, which can be used to prevent network attacks, appear to be mature in IPv6.
- Applications: The testing confirmed that basic application functionality is up and running. Microsoft Windows Media Player and Panasonic IPv6-controlled web-enabled video cameras were demonstrated to operate over the native IPv6 network topology. Several commercially available media conferencing software applications were also tested, such as France Telecom’s eConf, an application that transforms PDAs equipped with a miniature camera into mobile videophone devices via a wireless video link between two pocket PCs.
- DNS: Moonv6 successfully tested end-to-end domain name server (DNS) functionality on Linux, Microsoft, Sun and Hewlett-Packard HP-UX operating systems over the wide area network between Durham and Fort Huachuca, Arizona.
- Transition Mechanisms: The Moonv6 tests showed that dual-stack configurations (networks running IPv6 and IPv4 in parallel), provide the most seamless method of accommodating both protocols during the next several years, when both will need to coexist on the Internet.
The following organizations participated in Moonv6, phase II: AT&T, Chunghwa Telecom, France Telecom, Internet2, KDDI Labs USA, Native6, NTT R&D, Root Server Test Bed, U.S. Dept. of Defense, UNH-IOL, Agilent, Ixia, Spirent Communications, 6Wind, Check Point, Cisco Systems, Extreme Networks, Foundry Networks, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi, Hexago, Lucent Technologies, Microsoft, NEC, Netscreen Technologies, Nokia, Panasonic, Procket Networks, SUN Microsystems and Symantec. http://www.moonv6.orghttp://www.nav6tf.org