In this issue we are pleased to present Northrop Grumman’s process for transitioning to IPv6; IPv6 author Sylvia Hagen’s business case for IPv6; Ken Renard’s tips for avoiding deployment setbacks; Larry Robert’s introduction to a v6 video streaming improvement he developed; and my article on how a $10 billion investment in IPv6 can create 10 million new jobs and potentially add tens of trillions to American wealth.

Elections are a way to have a new beginning, to reflect on what has come before, fix the errors, and aim to achieve more. Users also have a kind of election when they chose to use a new technology, and when they start to use a newer technology. IPv6 is starting its campaign, and, unlike the last election, the outcome is known in advance: in the future, IPv6 will be the primary Internet protocol for the vast majority of users, uses, and Internet traffic.

In political campaigns, the best positions go to people who were either among the first to sign on, thus having a better chance to be part of an inner circle or “brain trust”, or made the biggest contribution, either through money, or by adding value through great advice. Technology versions work similarly: the big benefits often accrue to those who learn and adapt new versions first, and to those who make the effort to endorse the technology, and to make applications for it.

The US IPv6 Summit 2004, (http://www.usipv6.com), now one month away, will take place in Reston, VA, at the Hyatt Regency, and offers the opportunity to be part of an inner circle, to learn how to adapt and adopt IPv6, to have your vote counted by showing up, and to see what applications opportunities exist. The Dept. of Defense IPv6 Transition Office, the only agency of the US government to have the funding, the responsibility, and the context of a mandate with a deadline to move to IPv6, will give a greater quantity and variety of talks in one place on one day as ever before. There will be no better time and place to get the complete picture of how the DoD and the US government (which will follow the lead) intend to make the most of the incredible opportunity IPv6 offers.

We invite you to join us at the US IPv6 Summit. There are ten good reasons to sign up and show up for this v6 event:

1. Learn the latest about IPv6 technology, business, applications, and issues.

2. Meet the founding fathers of the Internet such as Vint Cerf and Larry Roberts.

3. Talk with virtually the entire support team and staff of the DoD IPv6 Transition Office, and tell them about your products, services, track records, and ideas related to the IPv6 transition.

4. Gain perspective on the DoD mandate from John Osterholz, who helped shape the DoD mandate for v6.

5. Get briefings from a number of leading companies related to IPv6, including some that are key to the US government who have not exhibited or explained their involvement ever before.

6. Hear from forty world-class speakers on all aspects of IPv6, ask the speakers questions either in session or potentially one on one (if time allows), and begin to establish your own name recognition with core people.

7. Begin to transform acquaintances into friends, allies, and potentially employers, employees, and partners.

8. Talk to the press, if you have news or valuable insights worthy of sharing with a large audience.

9. Get to know the IPv6 Summit organizers and potentially speak at one of our future events.

10. Be the very first to learn about both several new Dept. of Defense programs as well as the new IPv6 Association.

All that for $349 for the 3 day summit (only $189 for government). Please join us - we need your involvement!

In our last issue we presented the biographies of keynote speakers Vinton Cerf and John Osterholz. We are now proud to present the bio of Dr. Charles (Chuck) Lynch, Chief of the Dept. of Defense IPv6 Transition Office. Dr. Chuck Lynch is the Chief of the DoD IPv6 Transition Office which is responsible for providing overall coordination, common engineering solutions, and technical guidance across DOD to support an integrated and coherent transition to IPv6.

Dr. Lynch received a BS in Engineering Mechanics from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1984, an MS in Systems Management from the University of Southern California in 1987, and a Ph.D. in Information Technology Engineering from George Mason University in 2000. His academic research was in the integration of unprecedented complex systems.

He served as a regular officer in the U.S. Air Force working space and missile programs at both the system program office and headquarters staff levels. After separating from the Air Force, he worked as a contractor on the Strategic Defense Initiative and the International Space Station programs. He joined the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) in 1994 where he worked as a network engineer on global systems and as architect for next generation communications systems.

The transformation of communications for the US Government has started. The next generation of communications - involving satellites, wireless and terrestrial systems - is currently being implemented and their concept of operations is awaiting IPv6 capabilities. The need for improved protocols and capabilities is critical for providing essential communications to the future war-fighter and enabler. IPv6 will become a critical instrument of their arsenals - providing the mechanism for timely and secure communications in a net-centric environment.

Internet Protocol Version 6 enables war-fighting capability by increasing the flow of information into every aspect of DOD and federal communications from the largest command and control "system of systems", to ships, aircraft, satellites, weapons and tools, and even down to the individual foot soldier. Many do not appreciate the magnitude of this integration; most compare the IPv6 implementation to that of Y2K preparations or simply state it is just "the implementation of a dual stack or tunnel brokers." Both undervalue the magnitude of the benefits and risks associated with dynamic change. IPv6 brings added security capabilities, enterprise-to-enterprise interoperability, standardization, flexibility, common interfaces, rapid deployments, and plug-and-play architectures - all critically needed by our mobile military.

The need for methodology and structure to transition is critical. A detailed methodology and proven process must be implemented and followed across the DOD and federal communities. Northrop Grumman Information Technology, TASC has successfully integrated critical systems across the intelligence, commercial, and DOD communities. It is the System Engineering & Integration (SE&I) leader for billions of dollars of US Government assets, from Transformational Communications space programs to Homeland Defense networks, Intelligence networks, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms, and even the White House. We start by establishing strategic rules of the road such as:

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Today many carriers have concluded that interactive video does not work well enough over IPv4 networks to be functional. In many cases VoIP is also less than the quality we expect. As broadband access, WiFi, and 3G phone service expand, these services are needed. The reason they do not work well is that simple Class of Service (CoS) marking (DiffServ) is not capable of supporting a larger number of premium service calls than the circuit can support at the same time without discarding packets randomly from all of the calls. For example, if a DSL circuit can support 3 video calls and a fourth is requested, since they all have the same priority, they all will experience random discards of about 25% of their packets. This problem can be fixed with IPv6, using a newly approved TIA QoS signaling protocol.

The basic problem with premium services is that the user either wants good service (all packets delivered in a timely fashion) or he expects the call to be blocked. The Internet has mainly had to operate with TCP file transfer in the past, where a slowdown was acceptable if the network became overloaded. But with premium services, the call needs to be complete and operate at full rate. Slow delivery of real-time data creates a noise burst, and 25% noise is intolerable. Thus, a method is required where the network can accept or reject new calls depending on the capacity available. This is an end-to-end network function and the network must accept or reject calls or flows, not just packets, as is the practice today. The new feature of IPv6 is a flow label that tells the routers these packets are part of one flow. When this feature is combined with a signaling protocol that can request a rate, delay variance, and give precedence, then the network can look at the current load and accept or reject new flows. This is what the new TIA QoS signaling protocol accomplishes. It allows the network to control the premium service load, allowing or rejecting new real-time flows. Using the precedence field, emergency calls can still get through. For calls of the same precedence, ongoing calls are not impacted by new call requests. For more information on the protocol, an IETF RFC draft is available at http://www.packet.cc/IPv6Q-IETF-2A.htm.

Historically, signaling protocols were out-of-band and were processed in software. This resulted in very limited performance and long setup times. In the past, we started with SS-7 for the telephone network, went forward with ATM signaling, and now use RSVP and LDP for MPLS. All these protocols overload the software and are not suitable for real-time setup in IP. However, the IPv6 flow label and the TIA QoS signaling option are designed to be processed in hardware, thus there is no setup delay and no call setup overload. Calls can be processed at line rate with virtually no increase in the processing requirements. This is because the signaling option only needs to be processed for each flow, not each packet. Thus the increase in processing is typically less than 1%. This allows premium services, like video conferencing, to be set up across an IPv6 network and supported with near optimum quality, even when mixed with all other data services.

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Introduction

This article discusses what IPv6 means for your business. Should you invest in IPv6? If yes, when is a good time to do it? How can you plan for IPv6 in order to make your transition a smooth and cost-effective one?

Obviously, when you introduce IPv6 into a network, cost will initially rise. You have to educate your IT staff on IPv6, you have to build test beds that let you test IPv6 related issues, and you also have the costs of implementation.

And what is your return on investment? Why should you invest in IPv6, while you have a running IPv4 network? There are many heated discussions in this area, and it is important to ask the right questions in order to get meaningful answers.

There are some important facts that should be noted:

• IPv6 is inevitable in the long term.

• Supporting IPv6 will soon be a minimum requirement for hardware and application vendors.

• If you plan for IPv6 early you will save lots of money and many headaches.

This can be compared to any situation where you have to introduce a new technology into your network. What was the business case for introducing NAT? What was the business case for your whole IPv4-based infrastructure? What was the business case for upgrading servers to the latest version?

An infrastructure does not create a business case in itself. You need an infrastructure in order to be able to use and run applications and services which create a business case for your company. So you have to invest in your infrastructure, because you need a well developed and state-of-the-art infrastructure as a foundation for efficient business processes. You cannot use the newest and coolest applications, if your server runs an old-fashioned version of the operating system. You cannot use the newest and coolest applications and services that build on the advanced features of IPv6, while you are still running IPv4.

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Today's business and government operations are increasingly net-centric and face mounting difficulties in defending and improving vital networks. To meet the challenge, network leaders are laying a sound, future-proof foundation with the move to IPv6.

IPv6 delivers many improvements but from a security standpoint IPv4 and IPv6 may be nearly identical - mandated IPsec being the only obvious difference. So if these two versions of IP are nearly identical security-wise there shouldn't be any problems, right? Well, some insidious "gotchas" can ambush your network if you don't target them when considering IPv6 and your existing security tools, policies, and infrastructure.

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President George W. Bush and his administration have turned their attention away from winning re-election to preparing for the next four years, and to the judgment of history. Of all the slings and arrows from John Kerry, the one that had to sting the most was Kerry’s “America cannot afford a President who’s the first to lose jobs since Herbert Hoover in the Great Depression.” As evidenced by the election returns on Nov. 3, most voters understood that there are down turns, especially after the boom in the ‘90s, and that 9/11’s trillion dollar loss cost jobs as well, but all eyes will be watching to see whether and how the Bush administration creates jobs – and especially how many.
 
John Kerry set the target for the next four years: to create ten million new jobs. Just like winning the popular vote in 2004 has ended the legitimacy debate, so, too, would generating 10 million jobs go a long way to resolving the economics doubts of over 55 million people, and serve as a powerful track record for the Republican controlled House and Senate, as well as the Republican case for yet another presidency in the 2008 election. The US government should publicly embrace Kerry’s 10 million job goal.
 
Since this is 6Sense, the newsletter for IPv6, it might come as no surprise that we believe that IPv6 is the single best place to invest, the highest leverage, the biggest bang for the federal buck, to create those 10 million new jobs. This article will argue the case from several angles, after some context. Currently, the US government has, to date, budgeted funds (roughly $10 million annually) for Dept. of Defense’s IPv6 Transition Office (DITO), with additional funds being ramped up by the individual branches of the services. The Dept. of Homeland Security is the only other US government (or state or local) agency to mandate IPv6, but does not have a specific budget for that, so DoD is the clear leader for IPv6, and increasingly sets the pace for the rest of the world, a pace that will accelerate after the DoD/DITO's ten presentations at the upcoming US IPv6 Summit in December. DITO sets the definitions and criteria for compliance, though, thereby directly impacting over $25 billion in IT purchases that must include support for IPv6, and thus it is vital for companies seeking to sell IT to the U.S. government to understand and communicate with DITO.

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Publisher's Intro

Leadership for Engineering & Integration IPv6 Transition
Northrop Grumman IT, TASC

Premium Services over IPv6
Dr. Lawrence G. Roberts

The IPv6 Business Case
Silvia Hagen, Owner and CEO of Sunny Connection AG

IPv6 Transition and Information Assurance - Going Forward without Stepping Back
Ken Renard, Chief Scientist, WareOnEarth Communications

10 Million New Jobs from IPv6: The Case for US Government Investment
Alex Lightman, Chairman, US IPv6 Summit 2004

United States IPv6 Summit
December 7-10
Reston, Virginia
Military and Industry Technology Leaders Gather for New Internet Summit in Reston, VA.

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