Optimizing VIPNet

Abstract

IPv4 addresses are over, and the last IPv4 address blocks were distributed to regional NICs in February 2011. The world is trying to move to IPv6. Even though first version of IPv6 address specification was released in 1995 IPv6 has not fully deployed. According to statistics it will take few years to fully deploy IPv6 in the world. The main reason behind the delay of IPv6 deployment is the lack of IPv6 compatible applications. And in the other hand application developers does not have the required infrastructure to develop and test such applications. To address the above problem University of Colombo School of Computing developed VIPNet a tool which can be used to deploy virtual network environment. VIPNet is a low cost alternative for researchers as well as developers who are working on IPv6 (as well as IPv4). VIPNet requires only one computer and free and open source software to deploy the virtual network. Even though VIPNet is a good solution for the above mentioned problem, VIPNet could be further optimized and extended to improve the usability of the system. And the primary objective of this project is to identify possible optimizations and provide solutions to achieve them. As the secondary objective this project tries to evaluate the performance of the Optimized VIPNet and evaluate VIPNet and usability for network research.