The current IP address space is unable to satisfy the potential huge increase in the number of users or the geographical needs of the Internet expansion, let alone the requirements of emerging applications and services such as Internet-enabled personal digital assistants (PDAs), home area networks (HANs), Internet-connected transportations (for example, automobiles), integrated IP telephony services, IP wireless services, and distributed gaming. IPv6 is designed to meet these requirements and allow a return to a global environment where the addressing rules of the network are again transparent to the applications. A number of service providers in Japan and other parts of the world have already started offering commercial IPv6 services. Also many National Research Networks around the world support IPv6 services and consider IPv6 as key technology for their next generation networks.

At the same time, many service providers have embraced Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) as the enabler for the required multiservice capabilities of their next generation packet backbone network. Also, the widespread deployment of DWDM based optical transport systems in the core network to satisfy the tremendous need and increase in capacity demand, has led network planners to reconsider traditional approaches to ìprovisioningî and ìnetwork restorationî and plan integration of the optical layer into the MPLS infrastructure according to the emerging GMPLS technology. It becomes critical for IPv6 based networks to coexist and integrate with MPLS/GMPLS based multiservice backbone network.

This paper presents technology trends and defines a view of next generation network architecture. It presents an emerging network architecture for internetworking of IPv6 based access networks with service provider multi-service MPLS/GMPLS backbone networks including support of IPv6 global reachability services as well as IPv6 VPNs services. This is based on the use of the MultiProtocol extensions of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to distribute and control reachability information among smart edge devices for different address families (such as IPv4, IPv6, IPv4-VPN, IPv6-VPN) and then on the use of MPLS tunneling on top of a high performance, stable and simple core which remains unaware of all the various address families and services supported by the edge devices. The paper will review corresponding standardization progress and equipment implementations.