In this post for the Internet Society Rough Guide to IETF 102 I’ll review what’ll be happening at the IETF meeting in Montreal next week on the topic of all things IPv6.
IPv6 global adoption rates have shown slow growth since IETF 101 and are currently approaching 25% overall. With the almost total depletion of the remaining pools of new IPv4 addresses, more-and-more networks have been increasing their IPv6 deployments, with the top 15 network operators supporting nearly half-a-billion IPv6 users. In addition, 28 percent of the Alexa Top 1000 websites are IPv6-enabled, including many of the large content providers who are now delivering native IPv6 traffic to mobile devices in particular. The US recently reached 40% deployment with nearly 80% of smartphones using IPv6, whilst along with Belgium, India, Germany, Brazil and Japan who still lead the way, we’re starting to see significant growth in countries such as Switzerland, Portugal, Estonia, Uruguay, Ecuador, Peru and New Zealand.
IPv6 is always an important focus for the IETF, particularly with respect to the standardisation work related to the Internet-of-Things.
The IPv6 Maintenance (6man) Working Group is a key group and it will be meeting on Monday morning. It hasn’t published any RFCs since the last meeting, but has six new drafts up for discussion covering IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Extensions for Prefix Delegation, IPv6 VPNs, ICMPv6, OAM in Segment Routing Networks with an IPv6 Data plane, allowing low or zero valid lifetimes to be accepted in Router Advertisement Prefix Information Options where it’s known that there can only be one router on the link; as well as introducing a new IPv6 ‘unrecognised’ option for ICMPv6 that conveys whether an underlying network can transmit IPv6 packets.
There are also three working group sponsored drafts, adopted from the last meeting. Privacy Extensions for Stateless Address Autoconfiguration in IPv6 describes an extension that causes nodes to generate global scope addresses from interface identifiers that change over time; IPv6 Segment Routing Header specifies how a node can steer a packet through a controlled set of instructions (segments) by prepending an SR header to the packet; whilst IPv6 Router Advertisement IPv6-Only Flag is an update to RFC 5175 that indicates to hosts that a link is IPv6-only.
On Monday afternoon, the IP Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (ipwave) Working Group will also be meeting. This group has yet to publish its agenda, but has recently updated the specification for transmitting IPv6 Packets over IEEE 802.11 Networks in Vehicular communications; and has been defining the use cases for IP-based vehicular networks. Two new drafts have also been published since the last meeting relating to DNS Name Autoconfiguration for Internet of Things Devices and IPv6 Neighbor Discovery for Prefix and Service Discovery in Vehicular Networks.
There are two IPv6-related working groups on Tuesday. The Routing Over Low Power and Lossy Networks (roll) Working Group focuses on IPv6 routing issues for these networks and has published three RFCs since its last meeting. This includes an applicability statement for battery-powered remote metering devices and two others relating to routing headers and multicast parameters. There’s also a new draft on route discovery for symmetric and asymmetric Point-to-Point traffic flows.
The IPv6 over Networks of Resource Constrained Nodes (6lo) Working Group has a busy agenda with the IPv6 Backbone Router draft being prepared for a Working Group Last Call. There will also be an update regarding IESG review of the proposed revisions of RFCs 6550 and 6775 where 6LoWPAN Neighbor Discovery nodes in an RPL domain do not participate in the routing protocol, and a review of security considerations for Address Protected Neighbor Discovery that protects the owner of an address against address theft and impersonation inside a low-power and lossy network. Other drafts up for discussion include Design Considerations for Low-Power Networks to provide guidelines for improving interoperability, IPv6 over Power-Line Communication Networks, and on enabling IPv6 mesh networks over Bluetooth.
Moving ahead to Wednesday afternoon, the IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE 802.15.4e (6TiSCH) Working Group has an extremely busy agenda. The 6top protocol that enables distributed scheduling is now aiming for IETF Last Call, whilst the IESG feedback on the security functionality will be discussed. Two other drafts are also aiming for Working Group adoption including a description of a scheduling function that defines the behavior of a node when joining a network and a mechanism for carrying important information in infrequent network broadcasts. Another new draft defines a secure joining mechanism for enrolling devices into an 802.15.4 TSG network using 6TiSCH signalling methods.
The Homenet (homenet) Working Group is being held during late Wednesday afternoon. It recently published RFC 8375 which relates to the special use domain ‘home.arpa’, and the group will continue to discuss the Homenet profile of the Babel routing protocol. There are two updated drafts on the agenda, relating to third party provisioning of naming services for home networks and defining DHCPv6 options so that naming services can be outsourced.
Thursday morning sees the meeting of the Low Power Wide-Area Networks (lpwan) Working Group. This group recently published RFC 8376 which provides an informational overview of LPWAN technologies in order to perform a gap analysis.
There will be a discussion relating to the Working Group Last Call on the Static Context Header Compression (SCHC) framework, which provides both header compression and fragmentation functionalities; and on how to advance the LPWAN Static Context Header Compression (SCHC) for CoAP specification. Two other drafts are being presented for adoption by the Working Group relating to SCHC specifications (see https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-petrov-lpwan-ipv6-schc-over-lorawan-02 and https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-zuniga-lpwan-schc-over-sigfox-03).
Last, but very much not least, the IPv6 Operations (v6ops) Working Group will be meeting on both the Thursday afternoon and Friday morning. It’ll kick-off with a presentation on World IPv6 Trends from APNIC Labs who are one of the organisations tracking IPv6 deployment. There’s then one new draft up for discussion on NAT64/464XLAT Deployment Guidelines in Operator and Enterprise Networks which describes considerations with respect to applications or devices using literal IPv4 addresses or non-IPv6 compliant APIs, as well as IPv4-only hosts on an IPv6-only network.
There are also four existing drafts to be discussed. Requirements for IPv6 Routers defines a set of recommendations for routers, switches, and middleboxes deployed in IPv6 networks; Requirements for IPv6 Customer Edge Routers to Support IPv4 Connectivity as-a-Service extends RFC 7084 in order to allow the provisioning of IPv6 transition services for the support of IPv4 as a Service (IPv4aaS) by means of new mechanisms that were not available when RFC 7084 was published; Multi-Addressing Considerations for IPv6 Prefix Delegation considers prefix delegation considerations for both classic routing and various multi-addressing use cases; whilst IP over Ethernet (IPoE) Session Health Checking describes a mechanism for IP over Ethernet clients to achieve connectivity validation using PPP-style keepalives such as BFD Echo, or ARP and Neighbor Discovery functions.
At the Internet Society, we continue to promote IPv6 deployment. You can check out the World IPv6 Launch measurements for our latest measurements of IPv6 around the globe. You can also check out the Deploy360 online resources for getting started with IPv6 deployment. And you can read more about other topics of interest to the technology programmes of the Internet Society in the rest of our Rough Guide to IETF 102 posts.
IPv6-related Working Groups at IETF 102:
6MAN (IPv6 Maintenance) WG
Monday, 16 July 2018 @ 09.30-12.00 UTC-4, Laurier
Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/102/materials/agenda-102-6man/
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/6man/documents/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/6man/charter/
IPWAVE (IP Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments) WG
Monday, 16 July 2018 13.30-15.30 UTC-4, Laurier
Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/102/materials/agenda-102-ipwave/
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/ipwave/documents/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/ipwave/documents/
ROLL (Routing Over Low power and Lossy networks) WG
Tuesday, 17 July 2018 09.30-12.00 UTC-4, Duluth
Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/102/materials/agenda-102-roll/
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/roll/documents/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-roll/
6LO (IPv6 over Networks of Resource Constrained Nodes) WG
Tuesday, 17 July 2018 13.30-15.30 UTC-4, Duluth
Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/102/materials/agenda-102-6lo/
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/6lo/documents/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-6lo/
6TISCH (IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE 802.15.4e) WG
Wednesday, 18 July 2018 13.30-15.00 UTC-4, Duluth
Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/102/materials/agenda-102-6tisch/
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/6tisch/documents/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-6tisch/
Homenet (Home Networking) WG
Wednesday, 18 July 2018 15.20-16.50 UTC-4, Centre Ville
Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/102/materials/agenda-102-homenet/
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/homenet/documents/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/homenet/charter/
LPWAN (IPv6 over Low Power Wide-Area Networks) WG
Thursday, 19 July 2018 09.30-12.00 UTC-4, Centre Ville
Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/102/materials/agenda-102-lpwan/
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/lpwan/documents/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-lpwan/
V6OPS (IPv6 Operations) Working Group
Thursday 19 July 2018 13.30-15.30 UTC-4, Laurier & Friday, 20 July 2018 09.30-11.30 UTC-4, Place du Canada
Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/102/materials/agenda-102-v6ops/
Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/v6ops/documents/
Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-v6ops/
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It will be a busy week in Montreal, and whether you plan to be there or join remotely, there’s much to monitor. Read the full series of Rough Guide to IETF 102 posts, and follow us on the Internet Society blog, Twitter, or Facebook using #IETF102 to keep up with the latest news.