Empirical Study of Router IPv6 Interface Address Distributions

The IPv6 Internet is an important component of the Internet's continued growth and evolution. By several metrics, IPv6 has grown exponentially and now carries nontrivial amounts of production traffic. Less well-understood, however, is IPv6's topology and the way in which providers are using their IPv6 address allocations. Rather than relying on passive measurements or heuristics, which can bias inferences, here the authors use uniform active probing. They execute Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP)-Paris traceroute probes to an address in each /48 in all /32's advertised in the global IPv6 routing table (approximately 400 million traces from 26 globally distributed vantage points). At this granularity, they characterize the distribution of IPv6 interface addresses in the wild, and find significant differences among providers and regions. By providing insight into the structure of the current IPv6 Internet router interface addressing method, their hope is to better inform efforts to design future intelligent, active IPv6 topology-mapping algorithms and systems.