The latest test results are a mixed bag for IPv6, the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol.

Tests conducted this fall on Moonv6, the world’s largest native IPv6 backbone , showed improvement in the ability of network equipment vendors to conform to the IPv6 standards and interoperate with each other. However, the tests also showed significant performance degradation when network equipment runs both IPv4 and IPv6 services at the same time.

In this week’s newsletter, I’ll cover the findings from the military’s IPv6 tests, which ran on Moonv6 from mid-October through mid-November. Next week, I’ll provide details about the civilian-oriented tests underway at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) InterOperability Lab.

Moonv6 is a joint operation of UNH, the U.S. Defense Department, the North American IPv6 Task Force and the Internet2 university consortium. It links approximately 80 servers, switches and routers located in sites from New Hampshire to California. Established in 2003, Moonv6 supports two rounds of testing each year.

Moonv6 exists to help boost deployment of IPv6, which 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.

In its latest round of Moonv6 tests , the U.S. military tested IPv6 conformance, interoperability, functionality and performance. The tests involved seven groups within the Defense Department that represented all four branches of the military services. The Defense Department’s Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., led the military’s Moonv6 tests.

Vendors involved in the Moonv6 tests included Cisco, Juniper, Microsoft, Spirent, Ixia, Lumeta, Perle Systems, Jabber and Agilent. The tests included switches, routers, firewalls, IP compression devices and test equipment from these manufacturers.

"In prior tests, we focused on end-to-end performance," says Jim Jordan, director of business development for Spirent Federal, which provided IPv6 test equipment and personnel to help the military run the Moonv6 tests. "But in this round of tests we looked at individual device conformance to the IPv6 RFCs. We attempted to test 44 different IPv6-related RFCs."