In this post for the Internet Society Rough Guide to IETF 103, I’m reviewing what’ll be happening at the IETF in Bangkok next week.

IPv6 deployment hit another milestone recently, reaching 25% adoption globally. The almost total depletion of the pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses has seen the cost of an IPv4 address on the transfer market rise from USD 15 to 18 in just a few months, which has encouraged network operators to further step-up their deployment efforts.

There was some good news from the UK with the largest mobile operator EE and the incumbent provider of broadband Internet BT, increasing to nearly 30% and 46% respectively. Other mobile operators deploying IPv6 also saw a boost this month with the release of Apple’s iOS 12 update that adds IPv6 support for cellular data.

Belgium still leads the way, but Germany is rapidly catching up, followed by Greece, the US and India. France, Malaysia, Finland and Australia also seem to have seen a surge in deployment recently.

IPv6 is always an important focus for the IETF, and this meeting will see a lot of work with respect to deployment-related improvements and the Internet-of-Things.

The IPv6 Operations (v6ops) Working Group is a key group and will be meeting on Monday morning. It’s published four RFCs since its last meeting, including Happy Eyeballs v2, and this time will kick-off with a presentation on the CERNET2 network which is an IPv6-only research and education in China.

There’s also four drafts to be discussed, including three new ones. IPv6-Ready DNS/DNSSSEC Infrastructure recommends how DNS64 should be deployed as it modifies DNS records which in some circumstances can break DNSSEC. IPv6 Address Assignment to End-Sites obsoletes RFC 6177 with best current operational practice from RIPE-690 that makes recommendations on IPv6 prefix assignments, and reiterates that assignment policy and guidelines belong to the RIR community. Pros and Cons of IPv6 Transition Technologies for IPv4aaS discusses different use case scenarios for the five most prominent IPv4-as-a-service (IPv4aaS) transitional technologies, whilst NAT64/464XLAT Deployment Guidelines in Operator and Enterprise Networks is an updated draft that 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.

The other key group is the IPv6 Maintenance (6man) Working Group that will be meeting on Tuesday afternoon. Since the last meeting this has published just the one RFC on creating an IANA registry for updating the IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Prefix Information Option Flags, but has no less than nine drafts up for discussion.

The couple of working group sponsored drafts relate to specifying a IPv6 Segment Routing Header (SRH) and how this can be used by Segment Routing capable nodes, and specifying a Router Advertisement flag to indicate to hosts that a link is IPv6-only. There are also a couple of new drafts that specify how IOAM (In-situ Operations, Administration and Maintenance) records are encapsulated in IPv6, and defining the building blocks that can be used for OAM in Segment Routing with IPv6.

That leaves five existing drafts to be discussed, covering communicating NAT64 prefixes to clients with Router Advertisements, Updates to Requirements for IPv6 Options, Path MTU Discovery solutions, a new Path MTU Hop-by-Hop Option to record minimum Path MTU from source to destination, and IPv6 Packet Truncation procedures.

On Tuesday morning, the IP Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (ipwave) Working Group will be meeting. Most of the agenda is focusing on updates to the specification for transmitting IPv6 Packets over IEEE 802.11 Networks in Vehiclar communications, and the use cases for IP-based vehicular networks, but there’s recently been a couple of updates to DNS Name Autoconfiguration for Internet of Things Devices and IPv6 Neighbor Discovery for Prefix and Service Discovery in Vehicular Networks, so these may also be discussed.

The Homenet (homenet) Working Group has previously been quite active, but appears to be focusing on the Homenet Naming and Service Discovery Architecture during its meeting on Wednesday afternoon. There’s also an agenda item for general security questions, and a demonstration of SecureHomeGateway, before moving into discussions on re-chartering the group.

There’s also two IPv6-related working groups on Monday. The Routing Over Low Power and Lossy Networks (roll) Working Group focuses on IPv6 routing issues for these networks. This has a very busy agenda commencing with an update on the ROLL-BIER design that extends RPL to support routing based on Bit Index Explicit Replication (BIER) in environments with limited and lossy updates. There are seven other drafts up for discussion on Efficient Route Invalidation, RPL protocol design issues, route discovery for symmetric and asymmetric point-to-point traffic flows, a packet transmission rate metric for parent node selection, implementing the forwarding of copies of packets over different paths to different RPL parents, a proposal to extend the RPL protocol to install centrally-computed routes, and an update to the unicast routing services in an RPL domain.

The IPv6 over Networks of Resource Constrained Nodes (6lo) Working Group also has a busy agenda. This includes a discussion on the proposed draft that updates RFC 6775 to support registration extensions for simplifying these operations in 6LoWPAN routers, an update on Address Protected Neighbor Discovery for Low-power and Lossy Networks, an update to RFC 4944 with a simple protocol to recover packet fragments over a mesh network, and the IPv6 Backbone Router draft being prepared for a Working Group Last Call.

Other drafts up for review include transmitting IPv6 packets over Near Field Communication (NFC), a new type of 6LoWPAN routing header containing delivery deadlines for data packets, and IPv6 over Power-Line Communication Networks. The session will be rounded-off with a performance report on fragment forwarding and recovery.

Tuesday morning sees the meeting of the Low Power Wide-Area Networks (lpwan) Working Group. There will be another discussion around whether to move to a Working Group Last Call on the Static Context Header Compression (SCHC) framework for IPv6 and UDP, that provides both header compression and fragmentation functionalities. Three other drafts describe similar schemes for SigFox,LoRaWAN and IEEE 802.15.4 type networks.

Rounding off the IPv6-related sessions on Thursday afternoon, the IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE 802.15.4e (6TiSCH) Working Group, will focus on the specification for a combining a high speed powered backbone and subnetworks using IEEE 802.15.4 time-slotted channel hopping (TSCH). The 6top protocol that enables distributed scheduling is now heading for publication as an RFC, and there are also updates to the description of a scheduling function that defines the behavior of a node when joining a network and to define a security framework for joining a 6TiSCH network. If there’s time, a method to protect network nodes against a selective jamming attack will be discussed.

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: http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements

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 programs of the Internet Society in the rest of our Rough Guide to IETF 103 posts.

IPv6-related Working Groups at IETF 103:

V6OPS (IPv6 Operations) Working Group

Monday, 5 November 2018 09.00-11.00 UTC+7, Meeting 1

Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/103/materials/agenda-103-v6ops/

Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/v6ops/documents/

Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-v6ops/

ROLL (Routing Over Low power and Lossy networks) WG

Monday, 5 November 2018 09.00-11.00 UTC+7, Boromphimarn 1/2

Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/103/materials/agenda-103-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

Monday, 5 November 2018 16.10-18.10 UTC+7, Meeting 2

Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/103/materials/agenda-103-6lo/

Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/6lo/documents/

Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-6lo/

IPWAVE (IP Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments) WG

Tuesday, 6 November 2018 09.00-11.00 UTC+7, Meeting 2

Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/103/materials/agenda-103-ipwave/

Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/ipwave/documents/

Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/ipwave/documents/

LPWAN (IPv6 over Low Power Wide-Area Networks) WG

Tuesday, 6 November 2018 09.00-11.00 UTC+7, Meeting 1 Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/103/materials/agenda-103-lpwan/

Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/lpwan/documents/

Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-lpwan/

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/

Homenet (Home Networking) WG

Wednesday, 7 November 2018 13.50-15.20 UTC+8, Chitlada 3

Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/103/materials/agenda-103-homenet/

Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/homenet/documents/

Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/homenet/charter/

6TISCH (IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE 802.15.4e) WG

Thursday, 8 November 2018 16.10-18.10 UTC+7, Boromphimarn 1/2

Agenda: https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/103/materials/agenda-103-6tisch/

Documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/6tisch/documents/

Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-6tisch/

It will be a busy week in Bangkok, and whether you plan to be there or join remotely, there’s much to monitor. Read the full series of Rough Guide to IETF 103 posts, and follow us on the Internet Society blog, Twitter, or Facebook using #IETF103 to keep up with the latest news.