The Internet is getting faster than ever. Scientists at the California Institute of Technology and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have set a new Internet2 land speed record using IPv6, the next-generation Internet protocol. The team sustained a single-stream transmission control protocol (TCP) rate of 983 Mbits/s for more than an hour between CERN's facility in Geneva and Chicago, spanning more than 7000 km. That's the equivalent of transferring a full CD in 5.6 seconds.
This project overcame two significant hurdles. First, it achieved IPv6 forwarding at Gigabit-per-second speeds. Second, it established high-speed TCP performance across high-bandwidth/latency networks. Researchers at Caltech say that this development demonstrates how effectively IPv6 can be used and should encourage scientists and engineers in many fields to deploy the next-generation protocol.
"In the future, the use of IPv6 will allow us to avoid network address translations that tend to impede the use of video-advanced technologies for real-time collaboration," said Harvey Newman, Caltech professor of physics. "These developments also will empower the broader research community to use peer-to-peer and other advanced grid architectures in support of their computationally intensive scientific goals."
For more information, see www.caltech.edu or www.cern.ch.