"High Internet access, and the phenomenal growth of cellular phone use, has rapidly depleted the global IPv4 address space," says Floyd Ferguson, director, data network product planning for Fujitsu Network Communications. "This has resulted in the widespread use of NAT (Network Address Translation), a protocol that arose as a short-term solution to hold down the demand for IP addresses through address reuse. IPv6, with its near-limitless supply of address space, plus other protocol advancements, mitigates address shortage issues, eliminates the need for NAT, and provides a solid platform for IT advancement and deployment of new end-to-end applications."

The Moonv6 project is a collaborative effort between the North American IPv6 Task Force (NAv6TF), the UNH-IOL, the Joint Interoperability Testing Command (JITC), various other Department of Defense (DoD) agencies, and Internet2 (I2). Taking place at multiple locations in North America, the Moonv6 project represents the most aggressive, collaborative, IPv6 interoperability and application demonstration event in the North American market to date. The UNH-IOL network will carry IP traffic over a multi-vendor, multi-protocol, geographically dispersed network, and will test both interoperability and IPv6 capability in various real-life scenarios.

Moonv6 testing occurs in two phases. Phase 1 will begin October 6, 2003 and last until October 17, 2003. Phase II will take place sometime in January 2004. Extensive interoperability and testing will cover multiple areas, including: Core Protocol Functionality (RFC compliance, neighbor discovery, tunneling, transition mechanisms); Router Functionality (RIPng, BGP4+, OSPFv3); Network support services (DNS, NFS, LDAP, E-mail and web services, etc.); Applications (Streaming media, web browsing, SSH, common business applications, etc.); and Security (host system security, router security, red teaming).

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