Moonv6 network Advances IPv6 Interoperability

The Moonv6 project, a collaborative effort between the NAv6TF (North American IPv6 Task Force), the UNH-IOL, government agencies and Internet2, completed a new round of interoperability tests aimed at advancing IPv6 testing into new territory.



The latest round of testing, which began at the UNH-IOL on October 30 and wrapped up at the U.S. Defense Department's Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) in Fort Huachuca, Arizona on November 12, represented the most aggressive multi-vendor test and demonstration of IPv6 products to date, encompassing voice, wireless, firewalls and application-layer connectivity.
Test areas included interoperability in pure IPv6 as well as mixed v6 and IPv4 networks, IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs, VoIP, firewalls and IPsec, dual-stack routing, Internet protocols such as DHCP, DNS and various applications and transition mechanisms.



The Moonv6 network previously tested multi-vendor interoperability and basic Internet protocols and network functionality, QoS, basic Firewall functionality and Mobile IPv6, Domain Name System (DNS) and routing and border protocols Open Shortest Path First OSPF, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and Intermediate System-Intermediate System (IS-IS).




Industry participants included Agilent Technologies, AT&T, Check Point Software Technologies, Cisco Systems, Extreme Technologies, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, Ixia, Juniper Networks, Lucent Technologies, Nortel, Microsoft, Panasonic, Secure Computing, Spirent, Sun Microsystems and Symantec.



During the tests, the Department of Defense's (DoD's) Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) used Spirent Communications' test methodology, equipment and engineers to plan and prepare for the future of DoD IPv6 implementation milestones. In this round of testing, the November Test Set determined to what extent current DoD applications and vendor IP implementations, including hardware and software, interoperate when using select IPv6 features in a native IPv6 and dual IPv4/IPv6 environments.



Also during the Moonv6 even, Agilent Technologies demonstrated that its security and content networking-performance tester could validate firewall performance for VoIPv6. Specifically, Agilent's NetworkTester demonstrated the emulation of SIP and H.323 VoIP protocols at the same time as application protocols such as HTTP, SMTP, and POP3, allowing users to simulate IPv6-capable hosts and services running hundreds of thousands of real data transactions and voice calls per second. http://www.moonv6.orghttp://www.iol.unh.edu