Measuring IPv6 adoption rate and performance in the Internet

Abstract

Recently IPv6 has become a worldwide topic because of IPv4 address exhaustion, much is due to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the final IPv4 address blocks in February, 2011. IPv6 solves the addressing problem, however there is a low IPv6 adoption rate. Some of the reasons for low adoption rate are high adoption costs, return on IPv6 technology is not proven and solutions as Classless Inter-Domain Routing and Network Address Translation delayed the IPv4 exhaustion.

This thesis investigates the IPv6 protocol by conducting several measurements over longer distances. One of the studies will give an indication of the rate the IPv6 is being adopted in the world, by monitoring over seven thousand University webservers over a period of two weeks. Another study compares the TCP throughput performance of WWW protocol on five University webservers for both IPv6 and IPv4 networks over a period of two weeks.

The results indicated that the TCP throughput performance differences between the two Internet protocols were almost the same. The IPv6 adoption rate study did not result in a conclusive way, however an indication of an increase was observed and by additionally surveying previous work, and observing IPv6 monitoring websites on the IPv4 Internet, one can state that it is most probable that the IPv6 are being adopted continuously.