Author_Institution :
IT and DEEC, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Abstract :
The new internet based on IPv6 The IPv6 Deployment worldwide is becoming a reality now with some countries achieving more than 10% user penetration with Belgium (26.68%) and Switzerland (13.74%) at the top ranking (http://labs.apnic.net/dists/v6dcc.html) and reaching double digits v6 coverage on Google IPv6 stats. May Autonomous Networks (ASN) reach more than 50% with v6 preferred or v6 capable: (http://labs.apnic.net/ipv6-measurement/Economies/US/). Over 50 Million users are accessing Internet over IPv6 and probably not even knowing it. The US remains by far the biggest adopter of IPv6 with some 22 Million users followed by Germany, Japan and China with some 5 M users. Worldwide IPv6 deployment has passed the 4% Google usage bar doubling every 6 months (http://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html). If this trend continues, we should achieve 50% by 2017 which would be the inflection point when the full roll-out of IPv6 becomes a strategic plumbing decision of the networks, a topic that is avoided so far due to many strategic and resources issues (lack of top management decision-making, lack of v6 skilled engineers and v6 deployment best practices, very limited ISP v6 access deployment, …). The deployment of Carrier-grade NAT is in full swing making networking and user experience more brittle. The security and cybersecurity issues are like always brushed over at this stage due mainly to lack of IPv6 security skills. New topics are more on the lime light such as Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, SDN, NFV, 5G, … However, these fields are taking IP networking for granted designing them on IPv4/NAT building non-scalable and non-end to end solutions. The IPv6 Forum is driving new initiatives to garner support and create awareness in these are with initiatives such as the IEEE Comsoc IoT, SDN-NFV and 5G: www.ipv6forum.org.