Deploying IPv6 Networks

Book Preface

There is no doubt that information technologies have become a significant part of our lives, shaping in great measure the way people work, learn, and play. Their rise to prominence was accelerated over the past decade by computer communications. Networked computing devices have proven to be much more than their sum. This concept led to tremendous productivity increases and a plethora of new services that expanded its scope from research communities, to offices, to large corporations, and to the World Wide Web.

Unprecedented engineering innovation rapidly improved networking technologies in lockstep with the fast adoption of computer communications (which naturally require larger, faster, and feature-rich infrastructures). On the other hand, the trend of converging all communications, data, voice, and video to a single networking protocol revealed a resource constraint to the further adoption of computer communication- based services. IPv4’s address space cannot meet the needs of an ever-increasing demand for globally reachable IP devices. New services make address preservation a futile pursuit, with mechanisms such as Network Address Translation becoming anachronisms that block further innovation.

With the looming exhaustion of the global IPv4 address space and with the private address space proving inadequate for today’s networks, service providers, enterprises, IP appliances manufacturers, application developers, and governments are now looking at the evolution of IP: IPv6. The foreseen address exhaustion has been the trigger and the driver for moving into a new addressing dimension. IPv6, however, is more than just an extension of the address space. Significant reengineering efforts were applied to solving protocol, deployment, and operation issues. You should expect IPv6 to be a better protocol than IPv4. IPv6 is IPv4’s future, happening now!
The IPv6 protocol and its deployment represent the scope of this book.