Saif Bin Ghelaita Director of Technologies & Standards TRA UAE RESEARCH AREAS IN ICT Saif Bin Ghelaita Director of Technologies & Standards TRA UAE

Agenda Introduction ENUM IPV6 Next Generation Networks Conclusions What is NGN? Architecture Convergence Challenges Conclusions

Introduction ICT sector is developing rapidly Many sectors became dependent on ICT Financial Real Estate Education Health Currently, ICT sector is converging into a single network based on Internet protocol (IP).Such network is known as NGN. Moving towards NGN, opened many research areas such as IPV6 and ENUM which will be required to make the NGN more efficient.

Introduction Migrating from circuit switched network to packet switched network will enable the ICT sector to be more innovative. Currently, many countries started to invest heavily in the ICT sector knowing that it will drive the other entities into massive success.

ENUM What is ENUM Types of ENUM Features & Benefits Status & Next steps

What is ENUM? Provides a bridge between Internet based communications services and conventional telephone networks Converts telephone numbers to domain names and stores them Enables end users to associate one or more communications addresses with their telephone number: Internet addresses for VoIP services Email & instant messaging addresses Other telephone numbers Web pages ENUM is a protocol for mapping telephone numbers (PSTN) to domain names or Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) using Domain Name System (DNS) based architecture. ENUM is the result of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in its RFC 3761 which describes the use of DNS to store E.164 numbers and the available services to E.164. ENUM is about new service creation and not about carrier selection, or operator bypass, or about changing the numbering plan.

Types of ENUM Public User ENUM The end user can provision his or her records in the ENUM registry in the public domain e164.arpa. In other words, the end user is the registrant for the ENUM domain name within the domain e164.arpa Private Infrastructure ENUM Creating a domain name from a telephone number (TN) and resolving it to a URI. It does not, however, use the domain e164.arpa Private ENUM is used when there is a closed user group that wants to use ENUM to exchange IP traffic. Public Infrastructure ENUM National number administrators typically assign TNs to communications carriers, not to end users; carriers then assign the TNs to end users. The carrier’s network and its associated addresses are highly secure, and access is strictly maintained and limited to other service providers

Features and Benefits: ENUM using DNS resource records can map to different services such as: E-mail Addresses VoIP SIP/ H.323 Servers Voice Mail Servers Fax Website Others still to be introduced… ENUM enabled DNS creates a low cost shared service since DNS is already globally available, fast, reliable, and open to public. With ENUM using E.164 Telephone numbers: Consumers are already familiar with E.164 numbers One Number addressing eliminates need to remember multiple, complex addresses Telephone numbers are internationally understood and linguistically neutral

Status & Next Steps TRA is managing the UAE resources including ENUM Ready for ENUM Future plans include ENUM trials

IPV6 Why IPV6 needed? What will it add? Status & Next steps

Why IPv6? IPv6 solves the main problem is IPv4, that is, the exhaustion of addresses to connect to computers or hosts in a packet switched network. The key features of IPv6 are: Large address space:128 bits as compared to 32 bits in IPv4 Quality of Service: IPv6 brings QoS that several new applications require such as IP Telephony, Interactive games etc Why IPv6: IPv6 addresses the main problem of IPv4, that is, the exhaustion of addresses to connect computers or host in a packet-switched network. IPv6 has a very large address space and consists of 128 bits as compared to 32 bits in IPv4. Therefore, it is now possible to support 2^128 unique IP addresses, a substantial increase in number of computers that can be addressed with the help of IPv6 addressing scheme. In addition, this addressing scheme will also eliminate the need of NAT (network address translation) that causes several networking problems (such as hiding multiple hosts behind pool of IP addresses) in end-to-end nature of the Internet. Quality of service: IPV6 brings quality of service that is required for several new applications such as IP telephony, video/audio, interactive games or ecommerce. Whereas IPv4 is a best effort service, IPv6 ensures QoS, a set of service requirements to deliver performance guarantee while transporting traffic over the network. For networking traffic, the quality refers to data loss, latency (jitter) or bandwidth. In order to implement QOS marking, IPv6 provides a traffic-class field (8 bits) in the IPv6 header. It also has a 20-bit flow label.

Why IPv6? Mobility: Keeps the same IP address regardless of the network and the equipment is connected to. Stateless Auto-reconfiguration of Hosts: This feature allows IPv6 host to configure automatically when connected to a routed IPv6 network. Network-layer security: IPv6 implements network-layer encryption and authentication via IPsec. Mobile IPv6: This feature ensures transport layer connection survivability and allows a computer or a host to remain reachable regardless of its location in an IPv6 network and, in effect, ensures transport layer connection survivability. With the help of Mobile IPv6, even though the mobile node changes locations and addresses, the existing connections through which the mobile node is communicating are maintained.   To accomplish this, connections to mobile nodes are made with a specific address that is always assigned to the mobile node, and through which the mobile node is always reachable. This feature is documented in RFC 3775.

What will it add? – Internet for Everything IPV6 services or application are considered the drivers to move to IPV6 for many, such as: Home Networking Triple Play Peer-to-Peer Applications IPv6 VPNs Mobile networking Social applications (chat, VoIP, messaging, p2p)Digital IP-TVS IP-based VoIP Online gaming E-Health (Home Hospital care) Utility sector application Environmental Monitoring Sensor Networks Public Safety and emergency networks

Current Status of IPv6 Deployment In UAE IPv6 general Awareness: Yes IPv6 deployment in the Public sector: No IPv6 deployment in the Private sector: IPv6 curriculum in the Education: ISP’s deploying IPv6:

Next Generation Networks (NGN) NGN as defined by ITU: “A packet based network able to provide telecommunication services and able to make use of multiple broadband, QoS enabled transport technologies and in which service related functions are independent from underlying transport-related technologies”

Architecture Applications Service Control and Transport IP Core Access IM VOD Video Conf. VoIP Applications Service Control and Transport IP Core Mobile Access Access Fixed Access

Convergence The telecom network of fixed and mobile is converging to a single horizontal network that provides multimedia services over an IP based architecture. There will not be a circuit switched network in the future. The voice and data will be transported over IP. Universal Access:Wireline and wireless access.

Challenges The deployment of NGN using Internet Protocol (IP) connectivity to support fixed and mobile voice, video, data and IPTV provides new opportunities to innovative services. It also raises new challenges concerning Quality of Service (QoS) and Consumer Protection.

Quality of Service (QoS) Excellent voice quality of the circuit switched network. Is it going to be the same with IP based network? Many issues of QoS are related to IP networks such as voice quality, delay, jitter, etc. Migration from the existing network to NGN will introduce some challenges such as service disruption, speed of delivering the service and quality of multimedia services.

Consumer Protection The introduction of IP networks will bring challenges on how to handle phishing, unauthorized access to personal data and malicious virus dissemination via SPAM. In general, same threats available in Internet, could rise in NGN networks.

Conclusions The role of ICT ENUM IPV6 Benefits of NGN How to address QoS How to address Consumer Protection