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Forschungsberichte der Fakult¨at IV
Elektrotechnik und Informatik
Watching the IPv6 Takeoff
from an IXP’s Viewpoint
Juhoon Kim
Nadi Sarrar
Anja Feldmann
Technische Universit¨at Berlin
Technical Report
Bericht-Nummer: 2014-01
ISSN: 1436-9915
Februar 2014
Watching the IPv6 Takeoff from an IXP’s Viewpoint
Juhoon Kim
TU-Berlin
Berlin, Germany
[email protected]s.tu-berlin.de
Nadi Sarrar
TU-Berlin
Berlin, Germany
[email protected]labs.tu-berlin.de
Anja Feldmann
TU-Berlin
Berlin, Germany
[email protected]s.tu-berlin.de
Abstract—The different level of interest in deploying the new
Internet address space across network operators has kept IPv6
tardy in its deployment. However, since the last block of IPv4
addresses has been assigned, Internet communities took the
concern of the address space scarcity seriously and started to
move forward actively. After the successful IPv6 test on 8 June,
2011 (World IPv6 Day [1]), network operators and service/content
providers were brought together for preparing the next step of the
IPv6 global deployment (World IPv6 Launch on 6 June, 2012 [2]).
The main purpose of the event was to permanently enable their
IPv6 connectivity.
In this paper, based on the Internet traffic collected from
a large European Internet Exchange Point (IXP), we present
the status of IPv6 traffic mainly focusing on the periods of the
two global IPv6 events. Our results show that IPv6 traffic is
responsible for a small fraction such as 0.5% of the total traffic
in the peak period. Nevertheless, we are positively impressed by
the facts that the increase of IPv6 traffic/prefixes shows a steep
increase and that the application mix of IPv6 traffic starts to
imitate the one of IPv4-dominated Internet.
I. INTRODUCTION
Although designing a new Internet protocol was not the
most pressing matter within the Internet community in the
beginning of the 1990s, the unforeseen growing speed of the
Internet usage had started to cause worries about the exhaus-
tion of the Internet address space. Despite these concerns,
the exhaustion of the current Internet address space (IPv4)
became inevitable due to the consequence of overstaying in
the decision process of the movement to the new Internet
address space (IPv6 [3]). Even though the optimistic prediction
of the Internet growth was one of the major mistakes made
in the beginning of its evolution, Internet pioneers are not to
be blamed because it was nearly impossible to expect such a
massive success of the Internet at that point in time.
Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) has been developed by the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 1994 with a view
to succeeding the current version of Internet Protocol (IPv4).
Besides the expansion of the address space, developers of IPv6
took several demanding features such as the security (based
on compliance with IPSec), Quality of Service (QoS, via the
prioritization scheme and the non-fragmentation principle),
and the extensibility (using the chain header) into the design
consideration, while maintaining the simplicity of its predeces-
sor (IPv4). Even with such promising functionalities network
operators and software developers were not motivated enough
to adopt the new version of the Internet protocol because the
current version of the Internet protocol is irreproachable and
it was still too early to feel the scarcity of the address space
in their bones. Furthermore, it was commonly acknowledged
that inequalities of the benefit of and the demand for the new
Internet protocol among network operators made it difficult to
adopt IPv6 all together.
However, the situation has changed since the last block of
the IPv4 addresses has been assigned to the RIRs in mid-2011.
Soon after the IPv4 address depletion of the Internet Assigned
Numbers Authority (IANA), Asia Pacific Network Information
Centre (APNIC) reported that they reached the final stage of
the IPv4 exhaustion [4]. After all, major network operators
nodded at an implicit agreement that there is no more time to
calculate gains and losses. To this end, the Internet Society [5]
organized a 24-hour global IPv6 test flight (World IPv6 Day [1])
on 8 June, 2011 and more than a thousand globally influential
service providers have participated in the event. As no severe
problems have been reported from participants, the community
has decided to move a step forward, which is the World IPv6
Launch [2] event held on 6 June, 2012. The World IPv6 Launch
event was expected to be an important turning point in the
Internet history, because participants agreed to keep their IPv6
connectivity permanently enabled after the event.
In this paper, we study the changes to the IPv6 traffic from
the viewpoint of a large European Internet Exchange Point
(IXP). We analyze 14 months worth of traffic traces which
include the two world IPv6 events.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. We
first illustrate the vantage point of our measurement and traffic
data sets in Section II. The methodology used for conducting
our measurement is described in Section III. Then, we show
the characteristics of the current IPv6 traffic observed in our
measurement in Section IV. After that, we select publicly
available reports about the current status of the adoption of
IPv6 and summarize them in Section V. We overview the
related work in Section VI. Finally, we conclude the paper
in Section VII.
II. MEASUREMENT ENVIRONMENT AND TRACES
In this section, we give a brief overview of our data sets
and describe the vantage point that our data is collected from.
A. Internet eXchange Point (IXP)
An Internet eXchange Point (IXP) is a physical infrastruc-
ture for interconnecting Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and
ASes in order to reduce the end-to-end latency and the cost
AS 1 AS 2 AS 3
AS 4 AS 5 AS 6
IXP
Fig. 1: A simplified IXP topology
TABLE I: Data sets.
Name Period Global IPv6 Event
IXP11-v6day Jun. 5, 2011 – Jun. 15, 2011 World IPv6 Day
IXP12-newyear Dec. 25, 2011 – Jan. 7, 2012 —
IXP12-launch Jun. 1, 2012 – Jun. 11, 2012 World IPv6 Launch
IXP12-olympics Aug. 12, 2012 – Aug. 30, 2012 —
of transit traffic. A simplified topology of an IXP is illustrated
in Fig. 1. Through such infrastructures, its member ASes can
establish peering (or transit) relationships with other member
ASes. The volume of daily network traffic at an IXP depends,
amongst other things, on the number of networks connected to
the IXP. Our IXP has more than 400 members which makes
it one of the largest IXPs in Europe. For a detailed analysis
of the IXP ecosystem and the peering behavior of the IXP
participants we refer to [6].
B. Data Sets
We base our measurement on four sets of traffic traces
(see Table I) collected within the above-mentioned IXP during
a time span of 14 months including World IPv6 Day and World
IPv6 Launch (54 days of traffic in total). Note that one of
our data sets (IXP11-v6day) overlaps the one used in Sar-
rar et al. [7]. Due to the immense amount of traffic volume,
it is considered to be virtually impossible to capture and
store all packets. To this end, we collect our data using
sFlow, i.e., a network traffic sampling technology designed to
provide a scalable monitoring solution with low costs, with the
sampling rate of 1:16k. By the reasons of the space constraint
and the privacy concern, we only record the first 128 bytes
of the sampled packets. However, it is sufficient to include
all relevant information that we rely on, e.g., IP headers,
tunneling headers, and transport layer protocol headers. A
sampled packet is pipelined to the anonymization process
before being stored to disk for the purpose of muddling all
IP addresses of the packet, while the consistency of an IP
address and the size of the network prefix are preserved.
III. METHODOLOGY
In order to conduct our measurement, we develop an IPv6
traffic analysis tool to which text-formatted information ex-
2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
0
1K
2K
3K
4K
5K
6K
7K
8K
9K
10K
11K
The number of announced IPv6 sites
Year
Announced IPv6 Prefixes
Announced IPv6 ASNs
Observed IPv6 Prefixes in IXP
Observed IPv6 ASNs in IXP
World
IPv6
Day
World
IPv6
Launch
Day
Fig. 2: The growth of the IPv6 routing table since 2005 (shorter
lines are the observation from our data sets during 14 months
of measurement period). Lines from RouteViews data are
plotted in monthly intervals and lines from IXP data are plotted
five times within the period (each point represents the number
of prefixes and ASes observed within the corresponding traffic
data set).
tracted from sFlow traces is fed. Our analysis tool is designed
to identify IPv6 packets and to extract relevant information
from the identified IPv6 packets.
The tool identifies the transition technology in the current
measurement point (IXP) by observing the packet’s IP version
field, protocol number, and port numbers. For this, we use the
protocol number 41 as a clear indicator of 6in4 [8] technology
and the protocol number 17 combined with the UDP port
number 3544 as a clear evidence of teredo [9] technology. In
the same manner, ayiya [10] technology can be identified by
using the protocol number 17 and the UDP port number 5072.
However, we do not consider the ayiya transition technology
in our study since we observe only the negligible fraction
(<0.1%) of IPv6 traffic over ayiya. Indeed, teredo and 6in4
are the only transition technologies carrying a considerable
amount of IPv6 traffic.
IV. EVALUATION
In this section, we evaluate the change in the level of IPv6
deployment with emphasis on the impact of the two past
global IPv6 events (World IPv6 Day and World IPv6 Launch). In
general, we observe that IPv6 accounts for 0.5% of the total
Internet traffic in the peak period (IXP12-olympics) of our
measurement results.
A. Quantitative Analysis of IPv6 Traffic
In order to see how the level of IPv6 adoption has been
evolving, we download monthly snapshots of the IPv6 routing
table from the RouteViews Project [11] and illustrate them
in Fig. 2 together with the observed IPv6 prefixes within
our data sets. The figure shows the sharp rise in the number
of announced IPv6 network prefixes since the World IPv6
Day. More precisely, the number of IPv6 network prefixes
announced between the World IPv6 Day period and the World
World IPv6 Day World IPv6 Lauch Day
05 09 13
IXP11−v6day
25 29 02 06
IXP12−newyear
01 05 09
IXP12−launch
12 16 20 24 28
IXP12−olympics
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
IPv6 Traffic (in Gb/s)
native
6in4
teredo
(a) IPv6 traffic volume
World IPv6 Day World IPv6 Lauch Day
05 09 13
IXP11−v6day
25 29 02 06
IXP12−newyear
01 05 09
IXP12−launch
12 16 20 24 28
IXP12−olympics
0 100K 300K 500K 700K
IPv6 Traffic (in packets)
native
6in4
teredo
(b) IPv6 packet counts
Fig. 3: IPv6 traffic changes.
IPv6 Launch period (one year) is almost equivalent to the
total number of prefixes evolved during the last two decades.
Even though we observe only half of the globally announced
IPv6 prefixes at our vantage point, the increasing rate is still
significant.
When seeing the change of the IPv6 adoption in the
perspective of the traffic volume, the increase of IPv6 traffic
is even more drastic than the one shown in the prefix data. As
we see in Fig. 3, IPv6 traffic is increased by more than 50%
on the World IPv6 Day. Moreover, the volume of IPv6 traffic
is again doubled (approximately from 3Gb/s to 6Gb/s) within
the World IPv6 Launch period. The growth of IPv6 traffic is still
observed in our latest data set (IXP12-olympics).
The most significant change that we can discover from the
figure is that the increase of IPv6 traffic mainly results from
native IPv6 traffic. On the World IPv6 Day, we see more than
twice the volume of native IPv6 traffic and it does not decrease
after the event (even though it was supposed to be a 24-hour
test flight). Besides, another multi-fold increase of native IPv6
traffic is experienced in the World IPv6 Launch period.
With regard to the sudden peak of teredo packets observed
on 1 January, 2012 (see Fig. 3 (b)), we do not have a
clear answer for this phenomenon. However, we are of the
strong belief that the cause of this peak is rather due to
academic/industrial experiments than due to the participation
in the World IPv6 Launch event. This assumption is based
on three different observations. First, the number of teredo
packets falls back to the normal level in the World IPv6 Launch
period. Second, more than 40% of the total teredo packets
within the period are generated from a few IP addresses within
the same IP prefix. Third, most of the teredo packets are bubble
packets1in which there is no actual payload present.
Next, we evaluate how IPv6 traffic is distributed across
prefixes. Fig. 4 shows a Cumulative Distribution Function
(CDF) of IPv6 traffic contributed by the top-100 IPv6 prefixes.
Solid lines in the figure indicate the traffic fraction of the
prefix out of the total observed IPv6 traffic, while dashed lines
1A teredo bubble is a signaling packet typically used for creating and
maintaining a NAT mapping
1 10 100
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
CDF
Top−100 IPv6 prefixes ordered by traffic volume
Total Traffic (IXP11−v6day)
Total Traffic (IXP12−launch)
Total Traffic (IXP12−olympics)
Outgoing Traffic (IXP11−v6day)
Outgoing Traffic (IXP12−launch)
Outgoing Traffic (IXP12−olympics)
Fig. 4: CDF of IPv6 traffic contributed by the top-100 prefixes.
The prefixes on the x-axis are sorted by the IPv6 traffic con-
tribution from left to right in descending order. A logarithmic
scale is used on the x-axis to clearly identify points of the top
prefixes.
describe only the fraction of outgoing IPv6 traffic. The figure
shows that about 1% (50 prefixes in IXP11-v6day and 60
prefixes in IXP12-launch and IXP12-olympics) of the observed
prefixes contribute more than 90% of the total IPv6 traffic.
Moreover, almost 30% (IXP11-v6day and IXP12-launch) and
20% (IXP12-olympics) of the total traffic is contributed by
a single prefix. Given the fact that almost all traffic of the
prefix is outgoing traffic in IXP11-v6day and IXP12-launch,
we conclude (and also verify) that the top IPv6 contributor
in these periods is a content provider. However, by observing
the ratio between incoming traffic and outgoing traffic of the
top prefix in IXP12-olympics, it appears likely that the first
position in the traffic ranking is now taken by a large transit
network. Indeed, by further dataset inspections we confirm the
following assumption: The identified transit network is one of
the largest IPv6 backbone network in the world.
Yet, readers must note that this evaluation is based on
network prefixes. When prefixes are aggregated into the AS
level, the content provider (the top IPv6 traffic contributor in
IXP11-v6day and IXP12-launch) is still the largest IPv6 traffic
contributor in terms of the traffic volume.
B. Application Breakdown
In this section, we provide insights into the application
mix in IPv6 traffic. Fig. 5 shows the breakdown of the
traffic into applications. Note that the header size of transition
technologies is included in the traffic volume. Hence, we see
a significant fraction of teredo traffic in the figure even though
teredo bubbles2do not contain any actual payload.
The first application protocol that we need to pay attention
to is the Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP). Even
though the significance of NNTP traffic within the IPv6
network decreases drastically as the influence of web traffic
increases, it is important to understand its characteristics since
NNTP has been the dominant content carrier in the IPv6
world before HTTP became the major protocol and it is still
responsible for a considerable fraction of the IPv6 traffic.
NNTP has been considered an obsolete protocol for a while,
however recent measurement studies [12] have found that
NNTP revives (or survives) from its oblivion. They report that
NNTP accounts for up to 5% of the total residential traffic in
today’s Internet.
More surprisingly, Sarrar et al. [7] report that almost 40% of
the total IPv6 traffic is contributed by NNTP before the World
IPv6 Day. Our result shows a significantly different fraction
(about 20%) of NNTP traffic in the same period, but this is due
to the fact that we consider the header bytes of the transition
technologies as part of the application’s traffic volume. When
considering only the payload, our evaluation matches the one
reported in [7].
The next application protocol that we study is HTTP. As the
figure shows, the fraction of web traffic increases remarkably
on the World IPv6 Day and it reaches nearly 50% of the total
IPv6 traffic in the World IPv6 Launch period. The change of the
traffic shape has a particular meaning since the breakdown
of IPv6 traffic into applications becomes similar to the one
of today’s IPv4 traffic. Furthermore, the major share of IPv6
traffic is real content rather than signaling traffic. This leads
us to the conclusion that service providers start to break away
from the fixed idea that IPv6 is a faraway story and become
more active in providing Internet access through IPv6 to their
home and enterprise customers.
C. Native IPv6 Traffic Among ASes
We now investigate how native IPv6 traffic is exchanged
among ASes. For this study, we create a traffic matrix with
sorted ASes as columns and rows (more than 3,500 ASes).
Fig. 6 depicts the cumulative fraction of native IPv6 traffic
of AS-flows 3. In the figure, we only consider AS-flows
which contribute at least 0.001% of the total native IPv6
traffic, i.e., 1,386 AS-flows in IXP11-v6day, 1,761 AS-flows
2A teredo bubble is a signaling packet typically used for creating and
maintaining a NAT mapping
3We define an AS-flow as an asymmetric pair of ASes
World IPv6 Day World IPv6 Lauch Day
05 08 11 14 25 28 31 03 06 01 04 07 10 12 15 18 21 24 27 30
IXP11−v6day IXP12−newyear IXP12−launch IXP12−olympics
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
Fraction of traffic
other
teredo
(bubble)
icmp6
dns
nntp
web
<= 1024
> 1024
Fig. 5: Application breakdown. Traffic volume includes the
size of encapsulation headers.
in IXP12-launch, and 1,928 AS-flows in IXP12-olympics. The
figure describes that the traffic fraction of AS-flows increases
remarkably in the World IPv6 Launch period. Interestingly, the
amount of IPv6 traffic is largely concentrated in one AS-flow
(i.e., the AS-flow numbered as 1 on the x-axis). However, the
traffic contribution of this top AS-flow decreases from 11.19%
(IXP12-launch) to 7.46% (IXP12-olympics), while the traffic
share of those in the bottom 98% of IXP12-olympics outper-
forms that of IXP12-launch. From this result, we can infer
that the IPv6 traffic relationship among ASes slowly changes
from a 1-n shape to a n-n shape. This phenomenon is likely
related to the rapid growth of the transit network explained in
reference to Fig. 4.
Before providing more information of this specific AS-flow,
we narrow the scope of our investigation. For doing so, we
illustrate the matrix of the native IPv6 traffic fraction among
the top-25 ASes in Fig. 7. The cell in the figures are filled
with different levels of color depth according to their share in
the total native IPv6 traffic. Sums of IPv6 traffic transmitted
among these top-25 ASes are 14.86%, 30.61%, and 33.50%
in IXP11-v6day, in IXP12-launch, and in IXP12-olympics,
respectively. Readers might notice by the intuition that the
cell filled with the deepest color in Fig. 7 (b) and Fig. 7
(c), i.e., ones representing the fraction of traffic originating
from the AS numbered as 1 (x-axis) and destining for the
AS numbered as 2 (y-axis), are corresponding to the largest
AS-flow discussed in regard to Fig. 6. Furthermore, we can
determine that the AS numbered as 1 is the major source of
IPv6 contents. Adding up all native IPv6 traffic generated from
this specific AS, we find that 15.21% (IXP11-v6day), 29.93%
(IXP12-launch), and 17.88% (IXP12-olympics) originate from
that single AS.
From a closer inspection of that AS, we identify that this AS
belongs to one of the largest content providers in the world.
This might not be an eye-opener for readers because the con-
sumer behavior of Internet contents in the IPv6 world cannot
be very different from the one within the IPv4 world. However,
we believe that by studying these trends in IPv6 traffic and
Top 25 ASes
14.861 % of total native IPv6 traffic
Source ASes (ordered by the total traffic contribution)
Destination ASes (ordered by the total traffic contribution)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10111213141516171819202122232425
2
4
6
8
10
12
(a) IXP11-v6day
(b) IXP12-launch
(c) IXP12-olympics
Fig. 7: Traffic among top-25 ASes. ASes are sorted from left to right on the x-axis (from bottom to top on the y-axis) by the
volume of contributing native IPv6 traffic in descending order.
1 10 100 1000
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
Cumulative fraction of native IPv6 traffic
AS−Flows
IXP12−launch
IXP12−olympics
IXP11−v6day
Fig. 6: Cumulative fraction of native IPv6 traffic from an AS to
another AS (AS-flow). Only AS-flows contributing more than
0.001% of total native IPv6 traffic are considered. Links are
sorted from left to right by the amount of traffic in descending
order.
their core content providers we can help network operators to
come up with more effective strategies for implementing IPv6
in their networks.
Readers may still wonder about the identity of the AS in
which the most IPv6 traffic from the top content provider
is consumed (the AS numbered as 2 in Fig. 7). Regarding
the largest AS-flow which is shown in Fig. 6 and is also
illustrated as the cell filled with the deepest color in Fig. 7, we
reveal that the top IPv6 traffic consumer in our measurement
is one of the largest ISPs located in Romania. This is a
somewhat unexpected discovery for us since Romania has
not engaged any appreciable attentions in the Internet history
before. Taking a closer look at the traffic of this specific ISP in
the peak period of our IPv6 traffic (IXP12-olympics), approx.
3.02% of the total native IPv6 traffic is going out from this
AS, while about 14.23% of the total traffic is going into the
AS.
V. PUBLIC REPORTS ON IPV6 TRAFFIC
Various content providers and service providers have been
reporting the status of IPv6 traffic shown in their networks. In
this section, we select three relevant reports and summarize
them in relation to our measurement results.
A. Google
Google has been collecting the statistics about the IPv6
connectivity of their users and reporting the results since
2008 [13]. They claim that 0.34% of the total users have
accessed their website over IPv6 on the World IPv6 Day and
the fraction has increased to 0.65% on the World IPv6 Launch.
Given the fact that Google is the top ranked website in terms of
the number of visitors and the traffic volume, these fractions
indicate a considerable number of users. Our measurement
witnesses that Google is one of the biggest sources of IPv6
traffic.
Another observation they have made is that since March
2010 the fraction of IPv6 users of the native IPv6 technology
has overtaken the one of encapsulation technologies, i.e.,
teredo and 6in4. According to their report, the tendency of
the decrease in users of transition technologies becomes more
drastic over time. As a result, the share of users behind
transition technologies decreases from 11.76% (World IPv6
Day) to 1.54% (World IPv6 Launch) of the total IPv6 users.
Although our observation is based on the traffic volume, we
confirm the tendency of the native IPv6 domination. More
precisely, we see that the fraction of IPv6 traffic transferred
with transition technologies decreases from 55.49% (World IPv6
Day) to 46.74% (World IPv6 Launch). From our measurement
viewpoint, the amount of native IPv6 traffic has begun to
outstrip the amount of IPv6 traffic via transition technologies
since the World IPv6 Day.
B. Hurricane Electric
Hurricane Electric is a global Internet backbone and one
of the largest networks in terms of the number of customers
as well as the largest IPv6 network in terms of the number
of connected networks. According to the report of Hurricane
Electric [14], in the middle of 2012, 85.4% of the global
Top Level Domains (TLDs) have IPv6 name servers. In an
investigation of the top 1,000 Usenet servers, they find out
that 16.22% of them have IPv6 addresses. Given the fact that
the Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP, the protocol
used for Usenet) accounts for up to 5% of the residential
network traffic [12], the reported number of IPv6-enabled
Usenet servers may produce a substantial fraction of IPv6
traffic. Indeed, Sarrar et al. [7] report that almost 40% of
the total IPv6 is NNTP traffic before World IPv6 Day. We also
observe a considerable amount of NNTP traffic from our
measurement.
C. APNIC
The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) is
the first regional Internet registry whose IPv4 address pool
has been exhausted. APNIC measures the deployment level of
IPv6 based on the IPv6 preference for IPv4 addresses using
the BGP data. APNIC’s report describes that Europe has the
highest IPv6 preference (0.51 in July, 2012) for IPv4 addresses
among all continents. With the same metric, they report that
Romania is the highest ranked country in the world. Similarly,
the snapshot of Google’s IPv6 statistics in the same period
shows that 8.38% of their users from Romania access the
website using IPv6 which is the highest number among all
countries. We confirm that more than 17% of the total IPv6
traffic in the peak period of our measurement is contributed
by a Romanian ISP.
VI. RELATED WORK
Most of the studies made before the announcement of
the name space exhaustion focused mainly on performance
analyses of various transition techniques [15], IPv4 vs IPv6
comparison [16], and the deployment level of IPv6 based
on the address reachability [17], [18], [19]. This tendency,
however, became less pronounced as time passes. Instead,
researchers start to take a close interest in the characteristics
of IPv6 traffic based on real-world traces [20], [7]. In this
section, we choose a small number of publications which also
studied IPv6 and briefly discribe their work.
Raicu et al. [15] evaluated and compared the performance
of the two different IPv4-to-IPv6 transition mechanisms, i.e.,
host-to-host encapsulation mechanism (6-over-4) and router-
to-router tunneling mechanism (6in4), in terms of TCP latency,
throughput, and CPU utilization.
Malone et al. [17] quantified the number of IPv6 addresses
accessable in the Internet based on traffic data collected within
specific websites and DNS servers. They used prefixes of
identified IPv6 addresses in order to classify IPv4-to-IPv6 tran-
sition techniques. During their measurement (mid. 2006), the
authors observed the remarkable increase of teredo prefixes, but
still the least used compared to other transition mechanisms,
within their data sets. Karpilovsky et al. [18] also measured
the number of publicly announced IPv6 prefixes by analyzing
snapshots of BGP data obtained from RouteViews Project.
They reported that RIPE, i.e., Regional Internet Registry
(RIR) for European countries, is the increasingly dominant
registrar for IPv6 address allocation. Colitti et al. [19] analyzed
passively collected data from Google’s IPv6-enabled web page
and evaluated the degree of the IPv6 adoption. Their evaluation
shows that the adoption of IPv6 is still low but steadily
growing and that the vast majority of IPv6 traffic is contributed
by only small number of networks.
Gao et al. [20] proposed the method to classify the P2P
traffic from flow-baed IPv6 traffic and evaluated the stage
of the IPv6 deployment in China. They found that P2P and
streaming applications are accounting for the major fraction
of IPv6 traffic in China.
Nikkhah et al. [16] assessed the performance of IPv6 and
compare it to the performance of IPv4. They claimed that
the inefficient pathfinding is the major cause of the poor
performance that IPv6 shows.
Sarrar et al. [7] observed changes of IPv6 traffic on World
IPv6 Day by analyzing traffic traces collected from the same
monitoring point that our study bases on. They reported the
significant increase of IPv6 traffic (more than twice) on the
event day and found that IPv6 traffic did not decrease even
after the end of the event.
VII. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we evaluated the current status of IPv6 traffic
by analyzing the traffic trace collected from a large European
IXP during 14 months of the time span including the two
global IPv6 events (World IPv6 Day and World IPv6 Launch).
Even though we observed that IPv6 traffic accounts for only
small fraction of the total Internet traffic (0.5% in the peak
period within our measurement), our study on IPv6 traffic
showed that the deployment of IPv6 technology is finally on
the right track and we are slowly overcoming the shyness
facing the new Internet technology. Our claim is based on
three factors we have shown in the paper. First, the sharp
rise in the number of IPv6 prefixes and the IPv6 traffic has
been observed since the World IPv6 Day and the increase rate
does not slow down after the the World IPv6 Launch event. Sec-
ond, the application mix of the IPv6 traffic began to form
the current traffic status of the IPv4-dominated Internet, e.g.,
about 50% of HTTP traffic. Third, the fraction of native IPv6
traffic overtook that of traffic transferred within IPv6-over-
IPv4 technologies. We are of the belief that continuous efforts
on the IPv6 deployment such as World IPv6 Day and World IPv6
Launch will keep this increasing tendency.
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