TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT STANDARDS UPDATES
Augmenting ATCA Hardware Platform Management with IPv6 for IoT Backend Systems IPv6-awareness that has now been added to the HPM layer for ATCA and its complementary specifications. These additions have been led within PICMG by its HPM subcommittee. by Mark Overgaard, Pentair Electronics Protection
Discussions of the Internet of Things (IoT) typically focus on the “things” – that is, the millions or billions of small Internet-connected devices that constitute the “front end” user interaction points in an IoT-oriented system. Just as crucial, however, is the backend part of IoT, where potentially massive communication throughput and computation power is needed to service the needs of those millions or billions of “things,” possibly with stringent demands on the reliable availability of those services. The thoroughly field-validated AdvancedTCA (ATCA) hardware platform management (HPM) architecture is a strong candidate to be used for those backend systems, but there is a key challenge. The traditional ATCA HPM architecture only provides for the legacy version 4 of the Internet Protocol (IPv4), where the public addresses are 32 bits in size and close to exhaustion. In contrast, IP version 6 (IPv6), which was formalized way back in 1998, grows IP addresses from 32 bits to 128 bits, dramatically expanding the number of devices that can be addressed. Until just the last few years, the adoption rate for IPv6 has been very low. One reason (or consequence!) is that numerous workarounds were developed to stave off the biggest downsides of IPv4. For instance, Network Address Translation (NAT) applied at a point of internet access can allow one IPv4 address to represent hundreds, thousands or more private IP addresses; only the public address needs to be unique. But NAT and the other workarounds have downsides, such as complicating direct device to device communication, an important part of IoT friendliness. Now, however, the adoption rate is accelerating. As of mid-October, 2015, for instance, of the 10 largest network operators (by traffic volume) tracked by the IPv6 Launch organization, the fraction of IPv6 traffic was over 70% for Verizon Wireless, and over 50% for ATT and T-Mobile USA. Comcast had the highest traffic volume in that group; their fraction of IPv6 traffic was over 40%.
22 | RTC Magazine DECEMBER 2015
Figure 1 A block diagram for an ATCA shelf manager, in this case the widely used Schroff Pigeon Point shelf manager, showing that all protocols in the System Manager Interface are IPv6 enabled (including the ATCA-mandated RMCP), assumed to be running here on the most recent Pigeon Point shelf manager hardware platform, the ShMM-700R.