Testing IPv6 quality
Europe's largest IPv6 related Internet research project, 6NET, has distributed and tested IPv6 in realistic conditions. Thirty-one project partners have joined to form a plethora of representatives from research and industry. This was done in order to offer a native IPv6 network for test and demonstration purposes across Europe, to North America and the Asia Pacific region as well. An integral part of this project were Quality of Service (QoS) tests. Firstly each partner conducted IPv6 QoS tests locally on their testbed infrastructure. After the completion of this initial phase, additional QoS tests were conducted between partners across the 6NET infrastructure. Additionally, the preparation of Integrated Services using RSVP in a Mobile IPv6 environment was examined. Primarily, partners analysed the operation and interaction of QoS mechanisms in local IPv6 testbeds or production networks and validated the performance of QoS implementations for different platforms. In another phase, partners extended the QoS activity into 6NET's backbone network. The proposed QoS model was first studied, taking into account several aspects, such as the network dimensioning process, policing and admission mechanisms deployment. Subsequently, the suitable configuration which allows 6NET to provide QoS services was defined and potential disputes with other network services were discovered. Ultimately, numerous tests were specified and executed so that the performance of the QoS services in the 6NET network could be evaluated. A broad array of scenarios with diverse patterns of foreground and background traffic was performed so that the applied QoS model and its impact could be fully examined. The IPv6 flow label has been recently standardised and its use is expected to increase in the near future once security and admission control have been fully investigated.
