Re: [smartpowerdir] Pushing IPv6

[JP Vasseur <[e-mail]>]

Hi Russ,

You raised a critical point. I think that we should collectively help  
make a clear statement in the direction of IPv6 for SG.
1) Number of addresses: definitely an important aspect, even if these  
networks are not connected to the public Internet. In most SG  
networks, the number of routers/hosts is in the order of millions  
(e.g. smart metering but also primary/secondary/poletop substation  
automation).
2) Autoconf and support of stateless autoconf with v6, ...
3) SGs are mostly made of smart objects ... and all protocols  
developed at the IETF for smart objects are IPv6 protocols ! 6LoWPAN (http://www.ietf.org/dyn/wg/charter/6lowpan-charter.html 
: IPv6 compression over 15.4, fragmentation and re-assembly, ...), RPL  
(http://www.ietf.org/dyn/wg/charter/roll-charter.html) for routing in  
smart object networks (again for smart metering and sub-station  
automation), ... are all IPv6 protocols.

As pointed out by Sam, the level of maturity of IPv6 is some area is  
not equivalent to IPv4 but the protocols are there, vendors are  
aggressively developing v6 applications and starting with v4 is most  
definitely not the right thing to do. We need to remember that the  
scale of these networks is such that the IPv4 would unavoidably  
require complex architectures ...

Cheers.

JP.

On Jan 29, 2010, at 10:58 PM, Russ Housley wrote:

> ARIN has sent NIST a message saying that it is not possible to get  
> enough IPv4 addresses to support SmartGrid.  However, the NIST  
> document does not include a statement of preference for IPv6.  How  
> can we make that happen
>
> Russ
>