The cnWave network relies on IPv6 for Mesh routing. The cnWave radios communicate with E2E controller using IPv6.
However, it is possible to build a cnWave network completely without the knowledge of IPv6.
With L2GRE tunnel enabled, the user traffic can be completely IPv4 based- in fact, with L2GRE, all Ethernet/VLAN traffic will be supported. So, IPv4 or IPv6, running on top of Ethernet, would have no problem passing through the cnWave network.
As for IPv6 control traffic between the nodes and the E2E controller, the idea is to make sure that the POP nodes be in the same VLAN as the E2E controller and let the system takes care of the rest – the E2E controller has built-in mechanism to make sure that control traffic can reach any remote DN, as long as the E2E can talk to the POPs. If the network has to be divided into multiple VLANs, one E2E controller will be required in each VLAN. In this case, the operator can choose to use an onboard E2E controller (for a less than 20 nodes segment) or a standalone E2E controller for larger segment. The whole network can still be managed by single cnMaestro since the E2E controllers talk to the cnMaestro using IPv4.
The following shows two different deployment scenarios that one can achieve without knowledge of IPv6.
Note: E2E and cnMaestro are two separate entities, they can be hosted on same machine of different machines. cnMaestro can support both IPv4 and IPv6. We only show IPv4 here since this paper is for customers who wouldn’t want to deal with IPv6.