6NET is a three-year European project to demonstrate that continued growth of the Internet can be met using new IPv6 technology. It also aims to help European research and industry play a leading role in defining and developing the next generation of networking technologies.
6NET involves thirty-one partners from the commercial, research and academic sectors and represents a total investment of EUR 26.5 million; 65% of which will come from the project partners themselves, and 35% from the Information Society Technologies Programme of the European Commission. The project started on January 1st, 2002 and runs until December 31st, 2004.

Challenges

The extraordinary growth of the Internet in recent years has highlighted certain problems with the current protocol used in the Internet, i.e IP version 4. IP version 6 is a new version of the Internet Protocol (IP), designed to address these problems, and build to create a more robust successor to IPv4.

Major changes in IPv6 are:

• Increase of address size from 32 bits to 128 bits
• Autoconfiguration capabilities with embedded MAC address
• Plug and play autoconfiguration
• Authentication and privacy capabilities (IPsec)
• Improved support for extension headers and options
• Maximum MTU / jumbo payload
• Simplified header formats
• Flow labeling capabilities
• Multiple unicast addresses per interface
• Anycast addresses
• Mobile IPv6 support

Project-Goals

• Installation and operation of an international pilot IPv6 network with both static and mobile components in order to gain a better understanding of IPv6 deployment issues. The network will primarily use native IPv6 links (initially running at 155 Mbps and increasing to 2.5 Gbps in the second year), although encapsulation over IPv4 infrastructure may be necessary in some cases.
• Test of migration strategies for integrating IPv6 networks with existing IPv4 infrastructure.
• Introduction and test of new IPv6 services and applications, as well as legacy services and applications based on an IPv6 infrastructure.
• Evaluation of address allocation issues, routing and DNS operation for IPv6 networks.
• Collaboration with other IPv6 activities and standardisation bodies.
• Promotion of IPv6 technology.

Technology
The competence center Mobis is active in the fields of

• Mobility,
• Wireless LAN access, and
• IP communication.

As part of the mobility activities within the 6NET framework MOBIS will realize a Mobile IPv6 based Home Agent (HA) test environment consisting of two different HA implementations and an OpenH323 based MCU. This environment includes HA implementations of Helsinki University of Technology (MIPL) and KAME, and a Mobile IPv6 Current Node (CN) providing for an OpenH232 MCU to be used by 6net partners for testing of the Mobile IP functionality and for the realisation of regular GnomeMeeting based video conferences between 6net partners, as well.

IPv6-only wireless LAN access is another key research topic. Without enforcing a number of security mechanisms, a quite large number of attacks are possible against mobile nodes, correspondent nodes and visited domains. The goal is to analyse existing security mechanisms, to define a security architecture for a mobile node visiting wireless foreign domains and to design an AAA-based interaction model to support the enforcement of such an architecture. Setting up secure communication paths has to be part of a security framework to address all known security issues. An exhaustive set (or possible sets) of such paths is to be defined, while the necessary SA negotiations will be as much as possible embedded into Mobile IP and AAA control message exchange.

In the context of realtime videoconferencing and media streaming MOBIS will develop a voice-over-IPv6 demonstrator based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). This work package comprises a SIPv6-based infrastructure and a IPv6-telephone implementation as well. The investigation and development of suitable translation mechanisms between VoIPv6- and VoIPv4-users is an essential part of the work.

Mobile IPv6 Testbed
FhG Fokus offers a Mobile IPv6 testbed consisting of two home agents (HA) and a MCU as current node (CN). Please help testing the installation on a broader basis by using these HAs and the MCU as well.

Software Requirements
To use the HAs you need an implementation of Mobile IPv6. At the moment such implementations are available for Linux, FreeBSD andNetBSD as well.

To use the MCU you need an IPv6 capable h323 client, e.g. GnomeMeeting.