Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Defense Department begins six months of IPv6 interoperability tests

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 15:51:42 -0400

Defense Department begins six months of IPv6 interoperability tests

By LINDA ROSENCRANCE
OCTOBER 20, 2003

For the next six months, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) will operate the
largest multivendor IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6) network to date.

Today, the North American IPv6 Task Force announced that the network, dubbed the
Moonv6 project, has been deployed to evaluate next-generation Internet technology
to support network-centric military operations.
The DOD has said it will migrate its existing Global Information Grid Network,
based at University of New Hampshire, to the new IPv6 network by 2008.

"Future combat and defense systems need network ubiquity, mobility and security
that the current Internet protocol, IPv4, cannot provide," said Maj. Roswell
Dixon, Joint Interoperability Testing Command tactical data systems/IPv6 test
director at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., in a statement. "The lack of security and
flexibility in the current protocol has hampered efforts to build next-generation
secure communications."

In a telebriefing on Oct. 17, Dixon said the IPv6 project was groundbreaking for
the Defense Department. "This is the first time we've had representation from all
the services" in a test of the new protocol, he said.

The Moonv6 project is a collaboration among industry, engineering and several DOD
organizations and is designed to examine the interoperability of IPv6 equipment,
software and services under real-world conditions.

The Interoperability Laboratory of the University of New Hampshire (UNH-IOL) just
completed the Moonv6 project's initial interoperability and test period, which ran
from Oct. 7 to 17. The goal is to keep Moonv6 up and running permanently as the
North American IPv6 backbone.

One of the major factors driving the move from the IP Version 4 now in use to to
IPv6 is a perceived scarcity of IP addresses for new devices such as
Internet-enabled mobile phones. IPv4 addresses are 32 bits long, enough for around
4 billion unique addresses, although inefficiencies in the division and allocation
of the address space means that many of these aren't available for use.

IPv6 extends the address length to 128 bits, or around 340 billion billion billion
billion unique addresses.

While governments and network operators in Europe and Asia have been conducting
large-scale tests of IPv6 for the last three years, the U.S. response to IPv6 has
been "lackluster," according to the Web site of Moon's organizers. And the country
is still playing catch-up: The DOD tests were originally due to begin on Oct. 3
and finish Oct. 17, but haven't yet begun, according to information provided by
the organizers.

Participants in the Moon tests include the DOD, the UNH-IOL, the North American
IPv6 Task Force, several networking software and equipment vendors including IBM,
Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Cisco Systems Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Sun
Microsystems Inc. and Nokia Corp., as well as Japan-based network operator Nippon
Telegraph and Telephone Corp., according to a statement issued today.

http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2003/0,4814,86243,00.html
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