INTERNET2 & iPV6

Internet2 is an advanced not-for-profit United States networking consortium led by members from the research and education communities, industry, and government.

The objectives of the Internet2 consortium are:
Developing and maintaining a leading-edge network.
Fully exploiting the capabilities of broadband connections through the use of new-generation applications.
Transferring new network services and applications to all levels of educational use, and eventually the broader Internet community.


The uses of the network span from collaborative applications, distributed research experiments, grid-based data analysis to social networking. Some of these applications are in varying levels of commercialization, such as IPv6, open-source middleware for secure network access, Layer 2 VPNs and dynamic circuit networks.

                                                                 

What is IPv6?
IPv6 or Internet Protocol Version 6 is the next generation protocol for the Internet.

Both IPv6 and IPv4 define network layer protocol i.e., how data is sent from one computer to another computer over packet-switched networks such as the Internet.

Specifically, IPv6 contains addressing and control information to route packets for the next generation Internet. IPv6 has a very large address space and consists of 128 bits as compared to 32 bits in IPv4. this addressing scheme will also eliminate the need of NAT (network address translation) that causes several networking problems (such as
hiding multiple hosts behind pool of IP addresses)
in end-to-end nature of the Internet.

Summary of Benefits in a nutshell:
1) Increased address space
2) More efficient routing
3) Reduced management requirement
4) Improved methods to change ISP
5) Better mobility support
6) Multi-homing
7) Security
8) Scoped address: link-local, site-local and global-address space