International meeting on IPv6 in Prague

The 7th 6NET Consortium Meeting of the 6NET international project consortium aimed at developing and popularising IP protocol version 6 took place on 26–28 January 2005 in Prague. Within a few years this protocol should replace the currently used IP communication protocol on the Internet. The objective of the creators of IPv6 was to solve the main disadvantages of its predecessor. These include, for instance, small address space resulting in lack of addresses and poor support of QoS (quality of services). The main topic of the meeting in Prague, which the CESNET association participated in organising, was the activity plan for the next half year which will be the last one in this project and also the preparation for the final evaluation procedure.

The consortium solving the international project 6NET (for more information see www.6net.org) has 35 members from academic institutions and commercial companies, including the Czech association CESNET. The initially three-year project is a part of the EU 5th framework programme. In contrast to the initial plan it was extended by half a year to the end of June 2005. This year it will be focused primarily on publishing and promotional activities. CESNET accepted the role of the editor for a book which should present in a comprehensible manner the progress reports of the individual work groups and other experience acquired in the project. Most probably, the book will be published in a combined form – it will be posted on the web first and then printed at a later date.

The remaining development works – particularly in the area of IPv6 multicast – will make use of the GÉANT2 network which is already offering IPv6 in the production mode.

Within the scope of the 6NET project, at the beginning of 2003 the CESNET association put into operation the first international circuit in the Czech Republic implemented on the basis of the IPv6 protocol. In co-operation with its foreign partners CESNET put into service a direct connection via IPv6 to the 6NET project network by means of the data circuit Prague–Frankfurt am Main with a capacity of 155 Mbps. It was a revolutionary breakthrough because up to that time all the then existing IPv6 circuits had merely used various forms of tunnelling IPv6 inside IPv4.

During the 6NET project, CESNET focused also on the development of the Liberouter router. In March 2004, in co-operation with the CzechLight project, a prototype of this router with the COMBO6 card and the COMBO-4SFP interface card (Gigabit Ethernet) was implemented to the optical circuit from Prague to Amsterdam where it was connected through the Cisco GSR backbone router straight to the 6NET network core.

The CESNET association was established by colleges and universities and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. At present it is financed from the funds of the Government's Council for Science and Research and of its members. The association builds and develops the national optical gigabit network CESNET2 designed for science, research, development and education and conducts research and development in the field of information and communications technologies. Thanks to its research activities and the results achieved, the CESNET association is the representative of the Czech Republic in the European project GN2 and in other international projects. At present, among other projects, it is working together with Canada, the Netherlands and the US on the building of the global lambda network GLIF (Global Lambda Integrated Facility), the Czech part of which is called CzechLight.