In the meantime the US has become number 1 IPv6 nation in the world while India had the lead for a couple of months with some 100 M IPv6 users http://6lab.cisco.com/stats/

IPv6 will be the driving IP Protocols for IoT, Smart GRID, and thereby for Smart Cities. Promoting IPv4 now to cities is irresponsible as NAT insecurity will be rampant and could harm smart cities down the road.

The public IPv4 address space managed by IANA (http://www.iana.org) has been completely depleted by Feb 1st, 2011. This creates by itself an critical challenge when adding new things and enabling new services on the Internet such as networks to manage smart cities. Without publicly routable IP addressing, the Internet of Things combined with 4/5G networks and anything that’s part of Internet of Everything (IoE) would be greatly reduced in its capabilities and limit its potential success. Most discussions about IoT and Smart City networks have been based on the illusionary assumption that the IP address space is an unlimited resource or it’s even taken for granted that IP is like oxygen produced for free by nature.

The introduction of IPv6 provide enhanced features that were not tightly designed or scalable in IPv4 like IP mobility, ad hoc services; etc catering for the extreme scenario where IP becomes a commodity service enabling lowest cost networking deployment of large scale sensor networks, RFID, IP in the car, to any imaginable scenario where networking adds value to commodity.

IPv6 deployment is now in full swing with some countries achieving over 60% penetration such as Belgium or the US and India with over 100 M users using IPv6 without even the users knowing it. Most of 4G networks in the US are deployed with IPv6 and even T-Mobile US has deployed 4G with IPv6 only. Apple is requiring from its apps developers to use IPv6 only for their apps staring June 1, 2016 which is a great shot in the arm of IPv6.

There are many inflections points happening this decade to influence the design of smart city networks. But It will be a combination of IoT, NB-IoT, LoRa, SDN-NFV, Cloud Computing, Edge Computing, Big IoT Data and 5G to sift through to realising this paradigm shift. The security and cybersecurity issues are like always brushed over at this stage due mainly to lack of IPv6 security skills.

This talk will be devoted to analyze the transformative impact of IPv6 on smart cities and smat nation programs using the potential mix of IPv6-based IoT, SDN-NFV, Cloud Computing, Big Data and 5G and its advanced features, highlighting the challenges and solutions moving forward.

The presenter will be able to use a couple of use cases to show pioneer smart city examples that went beyond the usual of IPv4 and NAT.