Development History of IPv6

IPv6 is the next generation IPv4 protocol. It provides enormous address space, which is equivalent to providing 6.65×1023 addresses for each square meter on the surface of the earth, thus thoroughly solving the problem of IPv4 address crisis. Meanwhile, to handle the problems discovered in the use of IPv4, IPv6 has a new packet structure design and provides new address configuration modes and neighbor discovery protocol, better QoS support, built-in security, excellent scalability and built-in mobility. As unanimously agreed in the industry, IPv6 will promote in an all-round way the development of a series of new services and technologies represented by mobile communication and digital appliances and provide a reliable basic protocol for a completely information-based society. Since RFC1752 was approved by IETF in 1994, IPv6 has now undergone 13 years of development. Up to February 2007, IETF alone has published 809 pieces of RFC documents concerning IPv6. The launch of Windows XP in 2001 indicates that the IPv6 has entered the life of ordinary people. After 2003, IPv6 products of mainstream data communication vendors have been put into market one after another. Up to now, IPv6 is already on the threshold for large-scale commercial application.

Historical Background of CNGI

In the era of IPv4, the address quantity China as the latecomer has obtained is not in proportion to its population and economic scale. Lack of IP address has become an obstacle for China's IP network development. Take the network of China Mobile for example. Up to 2006 China Mobile has approximately 300 million users. Its current IPv4 address resources are simply insufficient to meet the demands; therefore, it has to adopt a large number of private addresses. As NAT technique need be adopted frequently, many services require special configuration. For example, to develop stream media service, the specific protocols and applications are required to traverse NAT; to develop WAP service, the problem how to carry the user billing ID should be solved; to develop PUSH service and SIP service, the problem of considering users as the called should be solved. In particular, the mobile and roaming access of the terminals form a great challenge to the IP address allocation mode. All these problems make the network structure complicated and increase the operation cost. Moreover, when the service volume becomes large in the future, the service efficiency will become a serious problem and will directly influence the mobile user's experience of the service.

Considering the various problems of IPv4 and the promising future of IPv6, as approved by the State Council in August 2004, headed by the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Information Industry, State Informatization Office, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Engineering and the National Natural Science Foundation of China make concerted efforts to start the model project of China Next Generation Internet (CNGI). The objective of CNGI is to construct a next generation Internet model project consisting of a core network (covering 20 cities and 39 core nodes, with the maximal relay bandwidth reach 10G), access network and customer premises network as well as two network exchange center in Beijing and Shanghai, and to implement high-speed connection with the international next generation network.

After several years of strenuous construction, to March 2007, all the core network projects of the CNGI model project undertaken by different carriers have passed the check and acceptance of the state. After seeing the CNGI, Doctor Vinton G. Gerf, the current vice president and chief Internet expert of Google Inc. who has designed the TCP/IP protocol and the Internet architecture, remarked: "China has done considerable work for the research of the next generation Internet and the IPv6 technique developed by it has surpassed the research level of many Western countries. China has made its own contribution to the development of Internet in the world." As the Olympic Games will soon be hold in Beijing in 2008, Doctor Vinton G. Gerf hopes that at that time China will adopt the next generation network on a large scale so that more people can enjoy faster, better and safer network services. For the various parties of the CNGI project, the next task will be how to further make use of the advantages of IPv6 and transfer services such as 3G, NGN, IPTV and network interaction to the next generation network with IPv6 as the core.

Problems in CNGI Industrialization

As the next generation Internet model project with IPv6 technique as the carrier, the CNGI project is constructed not with the state-owned research institutes, governments and universities as the main constructors, but mainly by six basic telecommunication carriers including China Mobile, China Netcom/ Chinese Academy of Science, China Unicom, China Telecom, China Railcom and CERNET. As pointed out by Mr. Wu Hequan, Chairman of the CNGI Expert Commission and the Vice President of Chinese Academy of Engineering, among the multiple constructors of CNGI, it is the telecom carriers that play the major role. Within one year after the declaration of CNGI startup, the carriers had finished designing and assessing the network construction solution one after another. Each had shown its unique features in CNGI construction aimed at commercial application.

For example: 

• The CNGI experiment of China Mobile features mobile service. Its mobile network IPv6 experiment includes the introduction of IPv6 in 2G GPRS and 3G PS domain, IPv6-based IMS domain experiment and mobile terminal address planning experiment. In addition to 2G and 3G multimedia based on mobile IPv6, it has also put into experiment IPv6-based radio sensor node, network video and digital appliances. 
  
  
• China Unicom plans to transfer the fixed data services (VoIP network, Internet and videoconferencing network services) on its ATM data backbone network to IPv6 network; while its mobile service will also become part of the IPv6 network in the 3G era. To fulfill the above development goal, the CNGI application plan of China Unicom mainly consists of the construction of IPv6 model intelligent community, universal mobile terminal access service, CDMA1X network access service, private network access service and experiment concerning network integration. It has done a good work in the integration of IPv6 and MPLS, which well reflects its characteristics of full-service operation. 
  
  
• China Netcom has paid much attention to IPv6 MAN. In the development of IPTV service, IPv6 can provide many inherent characteristics that IPv4 does not have. Besides, China Netcom has joined efforts with Chinese Academy of Sciences and constructed a 7-node IPv6 network, through which they has jointly conducted a series of scientific application research, including supercomputer, grid computing, virtual astronomical observatory, high-energy physics research, China geonomy research data network and national digital library of sciences. 
  
  
• The services experimented on the IPv6 experiment network of China Telecom focuses on broadband access field, including videoconferencing, broadband access, VOD and remote monitoring services, etc. In the long-term objective of China Telecom, CNGI and CN2 will all be constructed into a carrier-class model network. 
  
  
• China Railcom focuses on the development of railway-related applications, for example, IPv6-based online ticket sales system.
  Before the CNGI was constructed, no one was sure whether the rich service applications suggested by the carriers can be implemented on the IPv6-based next generation network and whether the IPv6 equipment of the vendors in the industry could meet the requirements. As it is already known, in order for IPv6 to replace IPv4, the problem of actual deployment should be solved, but IPv6 as the service bearer network should meet such key requirements as high availability, QoS guarantee, security, manageability and maintainability.

In terms of actual deployment, first the carrier requests that the core network equipment should be able to implement the various functions and attributes defined by IPv6 and to fully support various IPv6 routing protocol such as RIPng, IS-ISv6, OSPFv3 and BGP4+. As the length of IPv6 address is four times of that of IPv4, the IPv6 routing table of a network will be at least 16 times of the IPv4 routing table on the network of the same scale. Accordingly the routing capability and transfer performance of the IPv6 core network equipment will be greatly improved. To deal with the possible routing difference in a dual-stack router when IPv4 and IPv6 networks coexist for a long time in the future, the routing protocol should also support IPv4 and IPv6 multi-topology to avoid generating false route (for relevant details, please refer to Technical White Paper for IS-IS Multi Topology ).

The actual deployment of IPv6 cannot be accomplished in a one-off way. At present IPv4 is the dominant protocol on Internet, the accumulated investment of the users in IPv4 is tremendous and the various applications on IP network at present is based IPv4. Thus, the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 will be a long process and the commercial application of CNGI will also be promoted gradually. In terms of network deployment, we should first introduce IPv6 in cities with large service demand, and then introduce it into the national network gradually. In terms of service loading, we should first introduce IPv6 for services such as videoconferencing that has high requirement for resources, thus to remarkably improve users' experience; then allocate IP addresses for electric appliances and cars after the IPv6 network has gradually ripened and finally transit to the next generation Internet fully based on IPv6. A common task for both the carriers and vendors is to guarantee that the carriers' investment in the current network will be protected and will increase in value in the whole transition period while protecting the current interests of low-end users. In the transition period, the support capability of IPv4-v6 transition technique will be an important index for measuring the performance of the data communication equipment.

On the core network, the carrier requires that online equipment should have 99.999% avaibility and Non Stop Forwarding (NSF) and Graceful Restart (GR) functions (refer to Technical White Paper for NSF ); 200ms end-to-end protection changeover upon fault should be implemented for voice and video services (refer to the Solution for High Availability NGN Bearer Network for the details); MPLS VPN technique should be adopted to isolate the flow of important service and VIP users to guarantee the security; QoS guarantee on the whole network should be provided for critical service and flow to guarantee the Service Level Agreement (SLA); in addition, the telecom multi-service bearer network can be monitored and managed and be easy to maintain.

These seemingly simple figures and performance indices have actually become the series of obstacles on the way of IPv6 commercial application. Overcoming the obstacles on the way are many world-renowned vendors including Cisco and Jupiter. Through its strenuous efforts in the competition for 3 and half years, to March 2006, Huawei had made up more than 70% of the CNGI application market share. In particular, its NAT-PT and BAS equipment has obtained all the market shares.

Huawei's way to IPv6 Success

During the construction of CNGI, Huawei has gained advantages not by chance. Through the years Huawei has been actively attending IPv6 forum, exchanging and discussion the development promise of IPv6 with the carriers and equipment vendors. As early as 1998, it started IPv6 technology pre-research and in 2001 finished developing IPv6 project model equipment. The release of its VRP5.0 Versatile Routing Platform in August 2003 marked that its IPv6 equipment could be applied commercially.

In July 2004, Huawei adopted high-end ASIC and 10G NP techniques in its core routers such as NE5000E/NE80E/NE40E and in September 2004 piorneered high-end IPv6 BRAS, which is among the first series of products in the industry that implements 10G full line rate processing of IPv6 packets and can adequately meet the carrier's performance requirement for IPv6 equipment.

Huawei not only fully supports various IPv4-v6 transition techniques such as dual stack, tunneling and NAT-PT, but has implemented Tunnel line rate forwarding through distributed hardware processing. The NP processing mode adopted by it not only makes NAT-PT the first in the industry that implements GE line rate processing, but enables it to flexibly develop various Application Level Gateway (ALG) as required, thus providing carriers with powerful smooth upgrading ability.

After VRP5.0 had implemented IPv6 commercial application, Huawei grafted Ipv6 module to VRP3.x and enabled the full line router products to support Ipv6 in June 2004. At present, all the integrated equipment, boards and interfaces of Huawei's data communication equipment all support Ipv6 and have passed IPv6 test, thus providing the utmost protection for the interests of the users of Huawei's low-end routing and switching equipment.

Huawei is one of the few vendors that can provide full network carrier products and solutions including data communication products, fixed network products and mobile communication products. Based on its thorough understanding of the service demands and technical characteristics of the telecommunication operation network accumulated through the years, Huawei has taken into full consideration the large-scale commercial application of IPv6 and can provide end-to-end IPv6 solution in such fields as Internet access, 3G, NGG and IMS/FMC. Huawei has invested an enormous sum of money in IPv6 research and development and boasts a powerful technical support and service system. The thousands of its researchers and developers in Beijing Research Institute, Shenzhen Software Department, Nanjing Research Institute, Banlgalore Research Institute in India and Silicon Valley Research Institute in America can customize the characteristics and services at any time according to the customer's demand Its nine divisions in both China and overseas each have complete ability for TURNKEY project operation and can provide carriers with all-sided and high-quality service.

It is because its strength in IPv6 field that Huawei can actively participate in China's CNGI network and service construction and help the six carriers join the first group in the IPv6 industry in the world. Huawei is looking forward to further creating values for customers in the process of IPv6 carrier-class commercial application and further facilitate people's communication and enrich their lives.