A Case Study of IPv6 Network Performance: Packet Delay, Loss, and Reordering

Abstract

Internet Protocol (IP) is used to identify and locate computers on the Internet. Currently, IPv4 still routes most Internet traffic. However, with the exhausting of IPv4 addresses, the transition to IPv6 is imminent, because, as the successor of IPv4, IPv6 can provide a larger available address space. Existing studies have addressed the notion that IPv6-centric next generation networks are widely deployed and applied. In order to gain a deep understanding of IPv6, this paper revisits several critical IPv6 performance metrics. Our extensive measurement shows that packet delay and loss rate of IPv6 are similar to IPv4 when the AS-level paths are roughly the same. Specifically, when the link utilization exceeds a threshold, for example, 0.83 in our study, variation of packet delay presents a similar pattern with the variation of link utilization. If packet delay of a path is large, packet-loss rate of that path is more likely to fluctuate. In addition, we conduct a first-ever analysis of packet reordering in IPv6 world. Few IPv6 probe packets are out-of-order and the reordering rate is 2.3⁎10-6, which is much lower than that of 0.79% in IPv4 world. Our analysis consolidates an experimental basis for operators and researchers of IPv6 networks.