18 6NET

The international 6NET project (IST-2001-32063) that was included in the Fifth Framework Programme of the EU, ended in June 2005. Its main goals were:

Deployment and testing of a pan-European network utilising exclusively IPv6.
Development of new protocols and technologies for IPv6 networks and their integration into the existing Internet.
Popularisation and propagation of IPv6.

At the beginning of 2005, the network infrastructure of the project ceased its operation. The remaining 6 months were thus devoted to finalising the research activities, especially in the area of IPv6 multicast, and also to further documentation and dissemination of project results.

In January 2005, CESNET hosted the 5th meeting of the 6NET Consortium. The entire programme was also broadcast in real time.

During the regular evaluation of the project in February 2005, we demonstrated our contribution to the project by giving a video presentation of the multicast forwarding and filtering capabilities of Liberouter, see Section 4.3. The presentation was accepted very positively and the reviewers expressed their interest in this technology.

In September 2005, the 6NET Consortium published its main results in the form of a book [Dun05] presenting the formal deliverables of the project in a form accessible to the general technical audience. Two CESNET researchers contributed significantly to the book contents:

Ladislav Lhotka - Chapter 9 (Applications), part of Chapter 6 (Routing).
Pavel Satrapa - Chapter 2 (IPv6 Basics), Chapter 3 (Addressing).

The final review of the 6NET project in June 2005 was a remarkable success: The reviewers gave the project highest marks in all ten categories of evaluation.

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