Technological advantages of IPv6
Among the primary benefits Internet Protocol version 6 brings to Internet users is scalable services based on peer-to-peer signalling and network convergence, combined with the ability to restore end-to-end communications. Besides this, IPv6 eases the deployment of advanced network concepts and services such as security, mobility and Quality of Service (QoS). The Euro6IX project was the largest research project funded by the European Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme aiming to support the rapid introduction of IPv6 in Europe. Seventeen partners from the telecommunications, industrial and academic sector combined their research efforts to build a native IPv6 backbone of eight traffic exchanges established in major European cities. The Euro6IX backbone gradually became a place where network management applications and user trials focused on finding out how new services could be deployed to benefit all Internet stakeholders. As part of the Euro6IX architecture, a user initiated end-to-end bandwidth service was specified with all the protocols and functionalities of a Voice over IP (VoIP) carrier. Service providers and business customers are specifically interested in these value-added services that could be a realistic replacement for standard public switched telephone network (PSTN) services. However, for VoIP to offer users an acceptable level of voice quality, the carrier QoS architecture must ensure that voice packets are given priority over other kinds of network traffic. Urged by this need for high performance packet routing, the carrier QoS architecture selected was DiffServ with static resource assignment and no state maintenance required by the backbone routers. Although the preferential treatment that voice packets require was guaranteed by on-demand QoS, access to this service should furthermore be authorised and consumption of resources tightly controlled by the network. This functionality could be provided by network-edge routers, while the network core supported bare DiffServ QoS features. To deploy this architecture model, Euro6IX project partners proposed End-system-based Admission Control (EAC) relying on end-to-end network resource measurements. The overall on-demand QoS architecture can be implemented stepwise, starting with a simple scenario involving only trusted users and finally, resulting in a commercial service-like environment.
