Implementing IPv6 at Central University of Venezuela

Abstract

Central University of Venezuela is the main university of Venezuela and has approximately 60,000 students and 16,000 staff members. In the last few years, the university network has been expanded and currently about 8,000 computers are connected to the network. As a consequence of this expansion, users were suffering low throughput and network administrators were facing the shortage of public IPv4 addresses. To address the latter problem, NAT (Network Address Translation) has been deployed for several years at the university. However, NAT is a partial solution since it does not offer true end-to-end connections and, some Internet services that need to initiate connections from the outside do not work. In this paper, we present a solution to the two problems. Traffic congestion was alleviated with an update of the connection between the university and the major ISP, and a more rigorous filtering policy. To reduce the problem generated by the lack of public IPv4 addresses, we propose to deploy the new version of the Internet Protocol (IPv6) at the university. The basic idea is to migrate to IPv6 which offers a large space of IPv6 addresses and many other improvements over IPv4.