Internet Protocol Version 6 is gradually being adopted as the replacement for version 4. According to Google Statistics, IPv6 adoption is now 3.5% of all internet traffic. (http://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html ) Touted as a more secure protocol with increased address space, portability, and greater privacy. Research into this and other related protocols has increased, particularly in the context of smart grid, mobile communications, and cloud computing.

• "Smart Grid Communications: Overview of Research Challenges, Solutions, and Standardization Activities," Zhong Fan; Kulkarni, P.; Gormus, S.; Efthymiou, C.; Kalogridis, G.; Sooriyabandara, M.; Ziming Zhu; Lambotharan, S.; Woon Hau Chin, Communications Surveys & Tutorials, IEEE , vol.15, no.1, pp.21,38, First Quarter 2013  (ID#:14-1211) Available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6129368&isnumber=6449396&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fstamp%2Fstamp.jsp%3Ftp%3D%26arnumber%3D6129368%26isnumber%3D6449396   Optimization of energy consumption in future intelligent energy networks (or Smart Grids) will be based on grid-integrated near-real-time communications between various grid elements in generation, transmission, distribution and loads, according to the authors. This paper discusses some of the challenges and opportunities of communications research in the areas of smart grid and smart metering. In particular, they focus on some of the key communications challenges for realizing interoperable and future-proof smart grid/metering networks, smart grid security and privacy, and how some of the existing networking technologies can be applied to energy management. They discuss the coordinated standardization efforts in Europe to harmonize communications standards and protocols.

• "The Evolution of MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey," Pei Huang; Li Xiao; Soltani, S.; Mutka, M.W.; Ning Xi, Communications Surveys & Tutorials, IEEE , vol.15, no.1, pp.101,120, First Quarter 2013.  (ID#:14-1212) Available at:  http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6188353&isnumber=6449396&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fstamp%2Fstamp.jsp%3Ftp%3D%26arnumber%3D6188353%26isnumber%3D6449396  Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become a leading solution in many important applications such as intrusion detection, target tracking, industrial automation, smart building and so on. Typically, a WSN consists of a large number of small, low-cost sensor nodes that are distributed in the target area for collecting data of interest. For a WSN to provide high throughput in an energy-efficient way, designing an efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is of paramount importance because the MAC layer coordinates nodes' access to the shared wireless medium. To show the evolution of WSN MAC protocols, this article surveys the latest progresses in WSN MAC protocol designs over the period 2002-2011. In the early development stages, designers were mostly concerned with energy efficiency because sensor nodes are usually limited in power supply. Recently, new protocols are being developed to provide multi-task support and efficient delivery of bursty traffic. Therefore, research attention has turned back to throughput and delay. This article details the evolution of WSN MAC protocols in four categories: asynchronous, synchronous, frame-slotted, and multichannel. These designs are evaluated in terms of energy efficiency, data delivery performance, and overhead needed to maintain a protocol's mechanisms. With extensive analysis of the protocols many future directions are stated at the end of this survey. The performance of different classes of protocols could be substantially improved in future designs by taking into consideration the recent advances in technologies and application demands.

• “Comparison of Cloud Middleware Protocols and Subscription Network Topologies using CReST, the Cloud Research Simulation Toolkit; The three truths of cloud computing are: Hardware fails, software has bugs, and people make mistakes”. John Cartlidge, Dave Cliff. 2013 (ID#:14-1213) Available at: Available at: http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/home/cszjpc/pubs/CC_CLOSER_2013_CameraReady.pdf

• "The role of the RPL routing protocol for smart grid communications," Ancillotti, E.; Bruno, R.; Conti, M., Communications Magazine, IEEE , vol.51, no.1, pp.75,83, January 2013.  (ID#:14-1214) Available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6400442&isnumber=6400427&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fstamp%2Fstamp.jsp%3Ftp%3D%26arnumber%3D6400442%26isnumber%3D6400427  Advanced communication/networking technologies should be integrated in next-generation power systems (a.k.a. smart grids) to improve their resilience, efficiency, adaptability, and sustainability. Many believe that the smart grid communication infrastructure will emerge from the interconnection of a large number of small-scale networks organized into a hierarchical architecture covering larger geographic areas. In this article, first we carry out a thorough analysis of the key components of the smart grid communication architecture, discussing the different network topologies and communication technologies that could be employed. Special emphasis is given to the advanced metering infrastructure, which will be used to interconnect the smart meters deployed at customers' premises with data aggregators and control centers. The design of scalable, reliable, and efficient networking solutions for AMI systems is an important research problem because these networks are composed of thousands of resource-constrained embedded devices usually interconnected with communication technologies that can provide only low-bandwidth and unreliable links. The IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks was recently standardized by the IETF to specifically meet the requirements of typical AMI applications. In this article we present a thorough overview of the protocol, and we critically analyze its advantages and potential limits in AMI applications. We also conduct a performance evaluation of RPL using a Contiki-based prototype of the RPL standard and a network emulator. Our results indicate that although average performance may appear reasonable for AMI networks, a few RPL nodes may suffer from severe unreliability issues and experience high packet loss rates due to the selection of suboptimal paths with highly unreliable links.

• "Comparative Handover Performance Analysis of IPv6 Mobility Management Protocols," Jong-Hyouk Lee; Bonnin, J.-M.; Ilsun You; Tai-Myoung Chung, Industrial Electronics, IEEE Transactions on , vol.60, no.3, pp.1077,1088, March 2013. (ID#:14-1215) Available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6195009&isnumber=6331663&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fstamp%2Fstamp.jsp%3Ftp%3D%26arnumber%3D6195009%26isnumber%3D6331663  IPv6 mobility management is one of the most challenging research topics for enabling mobility service in the forthcoming mobile wireless ecosystems. The Internet Engineering Task Force has been working for developing efficient IPv6 mobility management protocols. As a result, Mobile IPv6 and its extensions such as Fast Mobile IPv6 and Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 have been developed as host-based mobility management protocols. While the host-based mobility management protocols were being enhanced, the network-based mobility management protocols such as Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) and Fast Proxy Mobile IPv6 (FPMIPv6) have been standardized. In this paper, we analyze and compare existing IPv6 mobility management protocols including the recently standardized PMIPv6 and FPMIPv6. They identify each IPv6 mobility management protocol's characteristics and performance indicators by examining handover operations. Then, we analyze the performance of the IPv6 mobility management protocols in terms of handover latency, handover blocking probability, and packet loss. Through the conducted numerical results, we summarize considerations for handover performance.

• "A New Approach to Coding in Content-Based MANETs", Joshua Joy, Yu-Ting Yu, Victor Perez, Dennis Lu, Mario Gerla, ICNC'14, Honolulu, Hawaii, February. 2014 (ID#:14-1216) Available at: http://nrlweb.cs.ucla.edu/publication/show/784 In testing the hypothesis that performance of the coding restricted to full caches is equal to that of unrestricted cases in CBMANETs with replicated caches of a file, they determined that full cache coding is competitive with unrestricted coding.

• "ICAN: Information-Centric Context-Aware Ad-Hoc Network ", Yu-Ting Yu, Chris Tandiono, Xiao Li, You Lu, M. Y. Sanadidi, Mario Gerla, ICNC'14, Honolulu, Hawaii, February. 2014. (ID#:14-1217) Available at: http://nrlweb.cs.ucla.edu/publication/show/785 The authors introduce ICAN, an ICN architecture that supports pull and push transport and context-aware multi-hop/DTN communication.

• IPv6 Research Center at NetworkWorld. (ID#:14-1218) Available at: http://www.networkworld.com/topics/ipv6.html   Updates on research topics and IPv6 implementation

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