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09 February 2010
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Spirent helps DOD complete IPV6 testing
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Spirent Communications has played a key role in both test provision and test design for the Defense Department's November interoperability exercise of Internet Protocol Version 6 capabilities, completed this week in Arizona.
Spirent, a division of Spirent plc, provided SmartBits traffic generation systems with Terametrics cards for Quality of Service flow routing, multicast routing efficiency, and Layer 2-7 QoS. The company also used its Abacus 5000 tester for Voice Over IP testing at three sites.
The Moonv6 Project is run from the Joint Interoperability Test Command at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., and includes sites in Maryland, South Carolina, Virginia, Illinois, New Hampshire, Alabama, and Washington DC.
The Pentagon has been a primary driver of IPv6 since early in the decade. The urgency of moving Defense Department networks to IPv6 accelerated when John Stenbit, formerly the Pentagon chief information officer, declared in June 2003 that all new equipment for Pentagon use must be IPv6-compliant by 2008.
Moonv6 is a project which brings the Defense Department and federal agencies together with the North America IPv6 Task Force, the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Labs, and the Internet2 project. While it is centered in this country, Spirent vice president of marketing Mark Fishburn said that Asian service providers like NTT are watching the program closely, since many carriers in Asia want to move quickly to IPv6 due to IPv4 address exhaustion in mobile networks.
A special IP test lab was set up by JITC at Fort Huachuca, and two phases of Moonv6 definition were carried out before the November Test Set. Fishburn said that he can't comment on specific interoperability difficulties discovered in the network until JITC makes a formal report in December to the Defense Information Systems Agency's IPv6 Transition Office.
However, Fishburn said, successful IPv6 implementation is an iterative process "where you may have to go back and re-think earlier implementations, since there are a lot of interactions between control and data plane."
During the November tests, a DoD network using IPv6 was tested for such capabilities as MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) Signaling, firewalls, transition mechanisms, conformance testing, and RSVP reservation protocols. At the DoD test sites, network equipment vendors' equipment was tested for implementing features in both native IPv6 environments, and dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 environments.
In addition to the native IP switching and routing testing, Spirent provided an Abacus 5000 tester for Voice Over IP tests, linking Fort Huachuca to the UNH labs in New Hampshire, and the Space and Warfare Systems Command in Charleston, SC.
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