IPv6 product testing needed, experts say

IPv6 products need more conformance testing. That's the conclusion of network industry heavy hitters AT&T, Cisco, Juniper, Lucent, Microsoft and others, which are developing products that support IPv6, the next generation of the Internet's main communications protocol.

Sixteen vendors recently completed a third round of interoperability tests on Moonv6, the largest native IPv6 backbone. Moonv6 is a joint operation of the University of New Hampshire (UNH) InterOperability Laboratory, the Department of Defense, the North American IPv6 Task Force and the Internet2 university consortium.

The latest round of tests involved approximately 80 servers, switches and routers at 10 military and university sites from New Hampshire to Arizona. Moonv6 was founded last year and has held prior interoperability test events in March 2004 and October 2003.

The latest tests ventured into new areas, including VoIP, wireless LANs and streaming video via multicast. Several firewall features were tested, as well as specific protocols, including IPSec, DNS and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. Routing, tunneling and QoS were included.

The Moonv6 consortium will issue a report on the latest tests next month.

"The underlying infrastructure of IPv6 is solid," says Erica Williamsen, Moonv6 technical manager. "The real work needed now is for vendors to fine-tune their implementations and interoperability, and for service providers to adopt and deploy it."

The Moonv6 tests are designed to help boost commercial deployment of IPv6, which is lagging in the U.S. behind Europe and Asia. The only major U.S. organization to commit to IPv6 is the Defense Department, which has a policy that requires all of its network hardware and software to be IPv6-compliant by 2008.

Developed by the IETF, IPv6 promises easier administration, tighter security and an enhanced addressing scheme over IPv4, the Internet's current protocol. IPv6, which uses a 128-bit addressing scheme, supports a virtually limitless number of uniquely identified systems on the 'Net, while IPv4 supports only a few billion systems because it uses a 32-bit addressing scheme.

Moonv6 testers - which included about 30 network engineers from vendors, UNH and the Defense Department - found configuration issues with several IPv6 applications, participants say.

"There were lots of configuration and stability issues with VoIP," says Gerard Goubert, voice and wireless manager at the UNH lab. "From our side, the network was fine but some remote sites had problems."

Goubert says the VoIP configuration problems were expected because the technology is so new.

"It was mostly just configuration of the test equipment so it would fit into the scenario we were trying to test," Goubert says. "It was nothing strange or abnormal."