The North American IPv6 Summit, held on June 14 to 17 in Santa Monica, California, U.S., gathered a lot of audience in DoD-related business, and discussed the latest in DoD transition to IPv6 as well as the current issues on IPv6 technology itself. In Part 1, we report on the keynote speeches by Vinton Cerf, Latif Ladid and Tom Mayhew.


IPv6 means a lot of software upgrade, too

Vinton Cerf, Senior Vice President of Technology Strategy for MCI and one of the fathers of the Internet, illustrated the current inconvenience with IPv4 addresses by telling that he was stunned when he was told to pay 5 dollars a month for every additional global address he wanted for his home. “I thought, hey, I invented the stuff!”

The Internet is spreading to new regions, and beginning to connect things like refrigerators or digital picture frames. In Japan, they are experimenting with car windshield wiper sensors to detect their movement to produce more accurate weather information.

IPv6 is not starting as IPv4 did. IPv4 started with established core. But IPv6 is starting from sparse edge and has to be run in parallel with IPv4 for a long, long time, he said.

There is a debate as to whether connected nodes should be single-stack or dual-stack. Single-stack leads to internetworking issues. Each node can only talk with nodes with matching protocol. Single-stack servers may have to be accessed through protocol translation.

IPv6 support is necessary for various network service software, such as router, network management, DNS resolvers and servers, registry/WHO IS databases. ISP provisioning software and back office software needs to support the two protocols. IPv6 uses server-centric mechanisms for name resolution as IPv4 does. But new rendezvous mechanisms may become more useful than DNS in discovering peers.

Analysis and documentation would be helpful to guide IPv6 development requirements. Application drivers will be the key to providing ISP incentives to deploy IPv6. IPv4 is not likely to go away entirely. But IPv6 is the only clean option to get more address space, he said.

Latif Ladid, president of IPv6 Forum, talked about IPv4 address depletion prediction by Geoff Huston, which indicated that IPv4 global addresses will be available for some time to come. But he said Huston acknowledged that we would have been beyond IPv4 address space if no NATs, gateways, DHCP pools or ALGs had been available. “NAT is about control, but IPv6 is about freedom,” Ladid said. IT vendors these days talk about on-demand computing, ubiquitous computing and organic computing. They can be summarized as what may be called “Futile Computing”, which is what IPv6 is all about. “IPv6 is like gravity. It’s a force that’s irresistible,” Ladid said.

Why the shift to net-centric?

Tom Mayhew discussed the changing role of IT in the U.S. military, saying that it is going through the biggest change since 1940s, when automobiles were employed as effective transportation method for Army, which led to the Interstate Highway Act in 1950s, changing the life of every American.

Mayhew is a senior director of Oracle Corporation’s Technology Business Unit, who is currently serving as senior Enterprise Solution Architect for Oracle customer organizations in DoD.

Based on his experience with DoD, Mayhew said that IPv6 is even a bigger transformation, which is crucial in moving toward the Net Centric Operation. He pointed out that the need for speed is forcing U.S. military to use commercial technology, citing the example that Army is forced to use FedEx to complement conventional Army logistics operation.

Successes in business world cannot help but influence military operation, he says. Companies like UPS, Amazon.com, Dell, and G.E. share the characteristics that they share the characteristics of global market reach, extreme asset utilization, low response time, global infrastructure, serving markets of individuals, rapid technology cycle, and market lifecycles of months. Mayhew said that U.S. military needs to sustain global presence and conduct effect-based operations with low response times. They are facing more amorphous threats. They have to keep more rapid technology cycles to help them outpace enemy’s OODA (Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action) loop.

For swift decisions and actions, current and future war troops need to share various types of information in an integrated way, information such as weapons mix, battle damage, threat indication, etc. Military information system has been traditionally based on data-centric architecture, but such need to know and share information at the frontline requires network-centric information management.

Mayhew explained the increasing need for U.S. military to be more aggressive in adopting emerging technology, noting that the network-centric operation hasn’t gotten to war fighters yet.