Towards a New Internet Protocol: the IPv6

The EU IPv6 Task Force has released its recommendations for adoption of IPv6 in Europe. The report includes recommendations to the EC, to industry and national governments. The report is available at the IPv6 TF web site.

Most of today's Internet uses IPv4, which is now nearly twenty years old. IPv4 has been remarkably resilient in spite of its age, but it is beginning to have problems. Most importantly, there is a growing shortage of IPv4 addresses, which are needed by all new machines added to the Internet.

IPv6 fixes a number of problems in IPv4, such as the limited number of available IPv4 addresses. It also adds many improvements to IPv4 in areas such as routing and network autoconfiguration. IPv6 is expected to gradually replace IPv4, with the two coexisting for a number of years during a transition period.

Europe's IPv6 research effort leads the world, with the European Commission alone contributing some € 55 m to research projects currently underway under its Fifth Research Framework Programme. Moreover, GÉANT the world's fastest research network is migrating to IPv6 shortly, providing a world-class experimental test-bed for new IPv6 applications and services.

Two major new European IPv6 research and deployment projects have started. in 6NET, at least eleven National Research and Education Networks will establish a native IPv6 network running at link speeds of up to 2.5 Gbit/s. The work will be valuable in validating IPv6 for production use on the European GÉANT research network.

More technical details on Ipv6 on the European Institute for Research and Strategic Studies in telecommunications website:
http://www.eurescom.de/public/projects/P700-series/P702/html/brochure.htm