Ciprian P. Popoviciu

IPv6 as a Practical Solution to Network Management Challenges

Over the paste decade, IPv6 communitys efforts to promote the next generation of the IP protocol revolved around generating business models that would justify the migration costs. The context, a depleting global address pool, and the target, global services, missed on one interesting opportunity for IPv6. Larger IP Service Provider and Enterprise networks are running out of IPv4 resources to manage their devices. Alleviating this problem with the help of IPv6 would be more valuable to them in the immediate future than providing user services. This paper reviews the current interest in leveraging IPv6 for management and it analyzes few possible protocol extensions that would enable its use in this role to a larger extent. While the paper discusses some of the challenges faced by these deployment proposals, it contends that this could be a reasonable and practical first step in the early adoption of IPv6 in large networks

Study of IPv6 Multicast Deployment in MPLS Netw

Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) [1] has been widely deployed in both service provider and enterprise networks alike. The main drivers for deploying an MPLS based forwarding mechanism for IPv4 include Layer 2 [2] and Layer 3 [3] Virtual Private Networks, and Traffic Engineering [4] and Fast Reroute [5]. The protocol transparency of MPLS infrastructures can also be leveraged, with minimal core impact, to provide IPv6 services. MPLS 6PE (Provider Edge) [6] has proven to be a popular and widely deployed architecture for forwarding IPv6 unicast packets across an IPv4 / MPLS enabled core infrastructure. Along with unicast connectivity, today¿s networks are more and more often required to support IP multicast services as well. It is estimated that new types of end-user applications will significantly increase the need for deploying IPv4 and IPv6 multicast solutions. This paper discusses two possible architecture options for deploying IPv6 multicast [7] forwarding across an already existing IPv4 / MPLS enabled core infrastructure. In both of the scenarios, IPv6 unicast packets are transported through an MPLS 6PE solution.

IPv6 Led Changes of the Broadband Access Architectures

The next generation of IP and the broadband networks are very well matched to support and stimulate each others growth. Of all IP infrastructures deployed today, broadband networks are the first to experience the constraints of both private and global IPv4 address space. These challenges make IPv6 an immediate necessity. At the same time, IPv6 offers features and functionalities that can improve current broadband services and stimulate the deployment of new ones. IPv6 leads to innovative, less constrained service architectures that have new, distinctive features. The changes and features driven by IPv6 are reviewed in this paper structured in two parts. The first part reviews the drivers for the IPv6 adoption in broadband networks. The second analyses the IPv6 impact on network and service architectures for access providers identifying the areas requiring further investigation