The India Internet Engineering Society (IIESoc) is set to expand a series of webinars that will support enterprises and organizations seeking to understand and implement IPv6 in the Asia Pacific.

It can be difficult to encourage enterprises and universities to adopt IPv6. One of the issues is a lack of understanding about the technical aspects of IPv6 among some enterprise technicians. Sometimes, technicians seek training but management does not always see the business case for adoption. These webinars aim to help address this misconception.

IIESoc is a non-profit working towards increasing the awareness, participation, and adoption of  Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards. IIESoc has an MoU with a US-based non-profit Industry Network Technology Council (INTC) working on a similar goal in the North American region.

In 2020, IIESoc and the INTC launched a series of webinars that helped enterprises and universities develop IPv6 skills, supported by the Information Society Innovation Fund (ISIF Asia). This grant will continue and expand the previous series of webinars.

Since 2008 ISIF Asia is supporting Internet development in the APAC region. ISIF Asia is a program of the APNIC Foundation. The APNIC Foundation leverages APNIC’s 25+ years of proven technical and developmental leadership to build human and community capacity for Internet development in the region. As the Regional Internet address Registry (RIR) for the Asia Pacific, APNIC has a unique position as an authoritative, respected, and trusted not-for-profit.

IPv6 deployment at NITK

The National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK), Surathkal, India expressed interest in migrating to IPv6 when IIESoc received a grant from ISIF Asia in 2020. The team from NITK Surathkal actively participated in the IPv6 webinars conducted by IIESoc, and in parallel, initiated the process to migrate their campus network to IPv6. During the migration process, the team from NITK Surathkal contributed back to IIESoc by delivering a couple of demo sessions on DHCPv6 and IPv6 in Cloud in the IPv6 webinar series, sharing their experiences from practical experiments. They also presented a lightning talk at APNIC 52 and published an article in IEEE Region 10 Computer Society Newsletter (July-September edition, 2021). Currently, the team at NITK Surathkal has finalized the address plan for their campus network and are in the process of leasing the IPv6 address block from the local Internet registry in India. Moreover, the team at NITK Surathkal, in collaboration with IIESoc and INTC, is preparing a document outlining the steps involved in migrating University campus networks to IPv6 in India.

IPv6 Webinars

New technologies such as 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT) are not only gaining traction but are poised to transform our lives in the coming years.   Will these inherently imply a transition to  IPv6 at enterprises?  We will be discussing this in our upcoming webinar series on IoT.  We will have a kick-off session at our annual Connections conference in April.  We will follow this up with a guided series on IoT.   We are working with a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) available on Coursera developed by IMT Atlantique France, one of the top 10 engineering schools in France.

A description of the class:

Industry 4.0 is an emerging domain of application for the Internet of Things (IoT), with the goal of reducing the management cost and contributing to the automation of the Operational Technology (OT) found in production chains in factories. Cost reduction can be achieved, in particular, by replacing the existing cables with a wireless medium, as long as an appropriate level of service for critical applications can still be guaranteed at all times.  Therefore, the standardization organizations put efforts into defining open standards for enabling a common architecture addressing the factories of the future requirements. By presenting the building blocks of such architecture, this MOOC will help the learners to adapt to the fast-changing environment in the communication for Industrial IoT.

Session 1: Introduction

Session 2: Medium Access Control (MAC) Methods for IoT

Session 3: 6TiSCH adaptation layer

Session 4: IPv6 and 6LoWPAN

Session 5: Routing protocol in Industrial IoT

This MOOC will be done over a span of 10 weeks.  The flow will be that the participants will log on to Coursera to do the session, then we will host a webinar for questions and answers.  The webinars will be every two weeks with the panellists being many of the people at the IETF who wrote the RFCs for these protocols as well as the professor(s) from IMT Atlantique France.

This year we will continue with IPv6 webinars focusing on operational considerations while migrating to IPv6 as well as the key role that IoT could play for the enterprises in moving towards IPv6 migration.

Call to action: Join our IPv6 Deployment project by subscribing to www.iiesoc.in/ipv6.

Dhruv Dhody, President IIESoc

Mohit P. Tahiliani, NITK & IIESoc

Nalini Elkins, President Industry Network Technology Council