Assessing performance of Internet services on IPv6

Abstract

The exhaustion of the IPv4 address space significantly increases the urgency for transitions to IPv6. Since native IPv6 support is not yet ubiquitous, a major concern of users and service providers (e.g., Facebook, Google, etc.) is that end-to-end performance via IPv6 could be substantially worse than IPv4. In this paper, we develop an analysis method and framework that matches DNS rendezvous information to flows so that we can compare and contrast performance over both protocols for a variety of Internet services. Our initial analyses focus on the basic services that are accessed using both protocols, observed client behaviors, and a presentation of performance characteristics of services using both IPv4 and IPv6. Our objective is to detect and expose differences by passive measurement without access to application traffic payloads. To demonstrate our method, we present results of an empirical feasibility study that considers the issue of Internet services performance over IPv6. Our study uses data collected on the World IPv6 Day, including both DNS requests/responses and flow export records for dual-stack hosts operating at a large research university. Our results expose various performance characteristics of Internet services that support IPv6: (1) Robust measures of services' flow bit rate distributions vary significantly by time of day, by number of active local clients, and by IP protocol version (6 or 4). (2) These rate characteristics differ amongst services. (3) There are regimes of time in which IPv6 flow bit rates exceed those of IPv4 and others where the IPv4 flow rates exceed those of IPv6.