With the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority assigning the last blocks in the IPv4 address pool in February of 2011, the year of IPv6 has clearly arrived. But there will be no flip of the switch. Instead, IPv4 and IPv6 must peacefully coexist for decades, a requirement that can affect network performance and user Quality of Experience (QoE) if not implemented properly
Being IPv6-ready requires a fair amount of testing through the entire development life cycle from Conformance, Functional and Performance testing. Here are a few questions that should be answered for any IPv6 implementation:
Conformance
- How resilient is the DUT to corrupted/invalid scenarios?
- Do the Routing protocols adhere to standards?
Functional
- How does the new header and addressing affect queuing?
- How well does the DUT store addresses and how efficiently can it lookup and forward packets?
- How do stacked headers affect the DUT?
- How well does QoS/CoS work with IPv6?
- How are routing protocols (BGP, OSPF, MPLS) affected by IPv6?
Performance
- How well can the DUT tunnel IPv4 and IPv6 (6over4, 4over6)?
- What is the impact of new state machines on the DUT (ex: neighbor discovery, anycast)?
- How well does multicast over IPv6 work?
- How well do stateful TCP and applications work over IPv6 and what is the impact on QoE?
Spirent helps answer these questions and more with ...
- Conformance: Test IPv6 routing protocols compliance against the standards
- Quality and Reliability: Scale the number of ports, subscribers, sessions, routes, tunnels, VLANs and stateful multi-play traffic on demand
- Troubleshooting: Perform quick and simple analysis with real-time statistics across all v4/v6 protocols
- Time to Market: Find bugs faster and accelerate schedules with a simple but powerful manual and automated interface
More information on public IPv6 events with Spirent participation:
