Department of Teleinformatics Network Services Royal Institute of Technology

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7Related Initiatives

As stated earlier, home networking is currently a very hot topic. Besides the development of a new Internet protocol, various other technologies are being developed to realize the vision of home networking.

7.1JINI

Jini is a high-level connection technology developed by SUN Microsystems. The goal is to enable the implementation of “smart devices” – a device that can self-configure, self-diagnose, and self-install. New concepts includes:

Instant on: true plug and play support. Services and resources are immediately made available without fuss.
Impromptu community: Automatically creates the Jini network or community – anytime, anywhere.
Resilient: Jini communities adapt very quickly to changes in the topology.
Special delivery: Jini technology services are available on demand, whenever they are needed.

For more information about Jini and its applications, please refer to SUN’s web site dedicated to the Jini technology at http://www.sun.com/jini.

7.2Universal PnP

Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) represents Microsoft’s initiative in home networking. UPnP is an open standard technology based on traditional IP solutions, which makes it both flexible and cost effective.
Some key features in UPnP includes:

Automatic Private IP Addressing based on DHCP and AutoIP (similar to IPv6 Neighbor Discovery)
Multicast Name Resolution and Dynamic DNS updates.
Simple Service Discovery Specification including the new Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP).

UPnP extends IPv4 with new features similar to native functionality in IPv6. Although, this adapts IPv4 for home networking, the solution is not as future proof as upgrading to IPv6. The development of this kind of extensions may hold back the development of IPv6 since the need of an upgrade is reduced.

8Conclusions

It is time to summarize, and the big question to be answered seems to be:
– Should IPv6 be introduced as the standard protocol for home networking?
A short answer to this question turns out to be:
– Yes! Eventually…
IPv6 will definitely become the dominating protocol in the future. It provides many new features suited for the upcoming demands in internetworking and especially home networking. Throughout this report, many advantages over IPv4 have already been revealed:

128-bit address to allow more globally unique nodes
autoconfiguration with neighbor discovery and mobility support
hierarchical addressing and routing
anycasting and native support for multicast
better performance through optimized headers
quality of service support with flows and traffic classes
integrated security using IPsec

All these new or enhanced features will indeed suit the home network environment to some extent in the future. It is hard to say, though, since neither IPv6 nor home networking has been fully deployed yet. Personally, I consider the autoconfiguration mechanisms the most appealing feature in a home network.

The number one reason for developing IPv6, the larger address space, is of course also a very important factor. Eventually, IPv6 will allow home users to assign all their devices and appliances with globally unique IP addresses for easy access. However, initially the solution with using IPv6 in the home network while the outside networks still only provide IPv4 will not be different from using private IPv4 addresses. Only when IPv6 is introduced throughout the whole access and core networks, and IPv6 connectivity will be more common, the addressing advantages will become obvious. It’s like the hen and chicken problem – IPv6 addressing will not be superior IPv4 until global IPv6 addressing is introduced.
Today, many of the advantages IPv6 has over IPv4 have already been realized as additional extensions to IPv4 such as multicasting and router discovery. Technologies such as Jini and UPnP also introduce features such as autoconfiguration and discovery to try to adapt IPv4 for home networking. This is however not nearly as good as using IPv6, which provides this functionality natively.
So, when should the IPv6 introduction in the homes begin? Is it too early to begin now? Commercial deployment of IPv6 today is far too risky due the experimental status of the protocol. Many specifications are still in progress and implementations likewise. Personally, I was quite surprised over the incompleteness of IPv6. There is currently not one single implementation of the IPv6 stack, which includes all of the specified functionality. Overall, IPv6 implementations today are very experimental and often contain bugs or lack functionality. This was quite surprising to discover bearing in mind that the development has been underway since 1994.
As a final conclusion, IPv6 should be taken into consideration in future projects related to home networking and similar areas to provide more insight and understanding. However, the introduction should wait until a complete solution can be presented and verified.

9Future Work

IPv6 is still under development and currently lacks commercial implementations. For Telia, this means a unique possibility to participate and affect the final specifications to suit Telia’s needs. To keep up with the competing operators, Telia should also consider the following actions:

Follow the development of IPv6 by joining the major mailing lists and participate in discussions and seminars.
Conduct more research and thesis works related to IPv6 to further investigate the suitability in various scenarios.
Follow the transition strategy and investigate the possibilities for IPv6 in access and core networks.
Look for “killer applications” that utilizes IPv6 and thereby increase its importance.
Investigate the possibility of using IPv6 for dial-up connections. To further increase the interest, IPv6 traffic could be billed at a reduced rate.

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