Understanding IPv6 Populations in the Wild

Abstract

With the global exhaustion of the IPv4 address pool, there has been significant interest in understanding the adoption of IPv6. Previous studies have shown that IPv6 traffic continues to be a very small fraction of the overall total traffic in any network, but its use is gradually increasing. Utilizing a novel display advertising approach to reach behind NAT and other firewall devices, we engage in a seven-month study of IPv6 in which we observe 14M unique IPv6 addresses including native IPv6, teredo, as well as 6to4. We exploit the intrinsic information within IPv6 addresses in order to infer IPv6 properties, such as, coarse grained geographic location, ISPs, the use of native IPv6 versus transition techniques, cone NAT usage, and even network interface manufacturer identifiers. We find that while the number of native IPV6 addresses in the wild is small (1.3%) a large number of IPv6 hosts are IPv6 capable via transition techniques such as teredo and 6to4.

We would like to acknowledge the generous support that has been provided by Google, the Internet Software Consortium and the RIPE NCC.