Investigating IPv6 Traffic

While the IETF standardized IPv6 more than fifteen years ago, IPv4 is still the prevalent Internet protocol today. On June 8th, 2011, several large content and service providers coordinated a large-scale IPv6 test-run, by enabling support for IPv6 simultaneously: the World IPv6 Day. In this paper, we compare IPv6 activity before, during, and after the event. We examine traffic traces recorded at a large European Internet Exchange Point (IXP) and on the campus of a major US university; analyzing volume, application mix, and the use of tunneling protocols for transporting IPv6 packets.

For the exchange point we find that native IPv6 traffic almost doubled during the World IPv6 Day while changes in tunneled traffic were limited. At the university, IPv6 traffic increased from 3–6 GB/day to over 130 GB/day during the World IPv6 Day, accompanied by a significant shift in the application and HTTP destination mix. Our results also show that a significant number of participants at the World IPv6 Day kept their IPv6 support online even after the test period ended, suggesting that they did not encounter any significant problems.