The GÉANT core backbone is now ready to fulfil the commitment to deliver IPv6 service as part of the GÉANT contract. This is a great opportunity for the Research Community to have access to a variety of production services, including the next generation of Internet Protocol, at very high speeds. DANTE and the IPv6 GÉANT task force are pleased to present in the next sections the roll out plan and technical design for the deployment of the pilot IPv6 service.
1. Migration of Internal Gateway Protocol (IGP)
Based on the current set-up and design of GÉANT we decided to build a dual stack core backbone. For that purpose we needed an IGP that can handle the routing of IPv4 and IPv6 routes.
GÉANT was initially implemented with OSPFv2 that can support only IPv4. In the first week of December 2002, we successfully introduced IS-IS in the core, and discarded OSPF. The results of this migration and IPv6 lab testing can be found at IGP migration.
2. IPv6 deployment
We are currently working on the addressing scheme of DANTE's address
space 2001:0798::/32 allocated by RIPE. We plan to achieve
this task by end of January and configure GÉANT's core backbone by
beginning of February 2003.
We have started the connections of European and US Research Networks
in April 2003. The current connectivity can be found in this table. The addressing plan and the IPv6 design
will be published when available at IPv6 design.
DANTE and the IPv6 GÉANT task force will define procedures for operating this pilot service. This work has begun with the questionnaire that has been sent out to the NRENs. We expect to define the type of access that NRENs will be able to use, the IPv6 routing policy, and delegation schemes for address space and reverse DNS if required. Some documents - still in draft form - which summarise our first thoughts can be found at IPv6 pilot service.