





Independent Submission                                        A. Keranen
Request for Comments: 6948                                      J. Arkko
Category: Informational                                         Ericsson
ISSN: 2070-1721                                                July 2013


    Some Measurements on World IPv6 Day from an End-User Perspective

Abstract

   During World IPv6 Day on June 8, 2011, several key content providers
   enabled their networks to offer both IPv4 and IPv6 services.
   Hundreds of organizations participated in this effort, and in the
   months and weeks leading up to the event worked hard on preparing
   their networks to support this event.  The event was largely
   unnoticed by the general public, which is a good thing since it means
   that no major problems were detected.  For the Internet, however,
   there was a major change on a short timescale.  This memo discusses
   measurements that the authors made from the perspective of an end
   user with good IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity.  Our measurements include
   the number of most popular networks providing AAAA records for their
   service, as well as delay and connection failure statistics.

Status of This Memo

   This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
   published for informational purposes.

   This is a contribution to the RFC Series, independently of any other
   RFC stream.  The RFC Editor has chosen to publish this document at
   its discretion and makes no statement about its value for
   implementation or deployment.  Documents approved for publication by
   the RFC Editor are not a candidate for any level of Internet
   Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741.

   Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
   and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
   http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6948.













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Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2013 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Motivation and Goals  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   3.  Measurement Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   4.  Measurement Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     4.1.  DNS AAAA Records  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     4.2.  TCP Connection Setup  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     4.3.  TCP Connection Delays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   5.  Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   6.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   7.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
   Appendix A.  Acknowledgments  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11

1.  Introduction

   Many large content providers participated in World IPv6 Day on June
   8, 2011.  On that day, IPv6 [RFC2460] was enabled by default for 24
   hours on numerous networks and sites that previously supported only
   IPv4.  The aim was to identify any remaining issues with widespread
   IPv6 usage in these networks.  Most of the potential problems
   associated with using IPv6 are, after all, of a practical nature,
   such as ensuring that the necessary components have IPv6 turned on,
   that configurations are correct, and that any implementation bugs
   have been removed.

   Some content providers have been reluctant to enable IPv6.  The
   reasons for this include delays for applications attempting to
   connect over broken IPv6 links before falling back to IPv4 [RFC6555]
   and unreliable IPv6 connectivity.  Bad IPv6 routing has been behind
   many of the problems.  Among the causes are broken 6to4 tunneling
   protocol [RFC3056] connectivity, experimental IPv6 setups that are
   untested and unmonitored, and configuration problems with firewalls.
   The situation is improving as more users and operators put IPv6 to
   use and fix the problems that emerge.




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   The World IPv6 Day event was largely unnoticed by the general public,
   which is a good thing since it means that no major problems were
   detected.  Existing IPv4 connectivity was not damaged by IPv6, and
   also new IPv6 connectivity worked as expected in vast majority of
   cases.  For the Internet, however, there was a major change on a
   short timescale.  This memo discusses measurements that the authors
   made from the perspective of an end user with well-working IPv4 and
   IPv6 connectivity.  Our measurements include the number of the most
   popular networks providing AAAA records for their service, as well as
   delay and connection failure statistics.

   The rest of this memo is structured as follows.  Section 2 discusses
   the goals of our measurements, Section 3 describes our measurement
   methodology, Section 4 gives our preliminary results, and Section 5
   draws some conclusions.

2.  Motivation and Goals

   Practical IPv6 deployment plans benefit from accurate information
   about the extent to which IPv6 can be used for communication and how
   its characteristics differ from those of IPv4.  For instance,
   operators planning to deploy dual-stack networking may wish to
   understand what fraction of their traffic would move to IPv6.  This
   information is useful for estimating the capacity necessary to deal
   with the IPv6 traffic and the impacts to the operator's IPv4
   infrastructure or carrier-grade NAT devices as their traffic is
   reduced.  Network owners also wish to understand the extent to which
   they can expect different delay characteristics or problems with IPv6
   connectivity.  The goals of our measurements were to help with these
   topics by answering the following questions:

   o  What fraction of the most popular Internet sites offer AAAA
      records?  How did World IPv6 Day change the situation?

   o  How do the traffic characteristics differ between IPv4 and IPv6 on
      sites offering AAAA records?  Are the connection failure rates
      similar?  How are round-trip times (RTTs) impacted?

   There have been many measurements about some of these aspects from a
   service provider perspective, such as Google studies about broken
   connectivity between Google and its end users.  Our measurements
   start from a different angle, by assuming good dual-stack
   connectivity at the measurement end, and then probing the rest of the
   Internet to understand, for instance, how likely there are to be IPv6
   connectivity problems or what the delay differences are between IPv4
   and IPv6.  Similar studies have been performed by the University of
   Pennsylvania and Comcast [IPv6Monitor] and RIPE NCC [RIPEv6Day].




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3.  Measurement Methodology

   We used the top 10,000 sites of the Alexa 1 million most popular
   sites list [Alexa] from June 1, 2011.  For each domain name in the
   list, we performed DNS queries with different host names.  For IPv4
   addresses (A records), we used host name "www" and also performed a
   query with just the domain name.  For IPv6 addresses (AAAA records),
   we used different combinations of host names that have been used for
   IPv6 sites, namely, "www6", "ipv6", "v6", "ipv6.www", "www.ipv6",
   "v6.www", and "www.v6".

   All DNS queries were initiated in the order listed above (first "www"
   and just the domain name for A records, then "www", domain name, and
   different IPv6-host names for AAAA records), but the queries were
   done in parallel (i.e., without waiting for the previous query to
   finish).  The first response for A and AAAA records and the
   corresponding host names were recorded.  The queries had a 3-second
   retransmission timeout, and if there was no response for 10 seconds,
   all remaining queries for the site were canceled.  We used a custom
   Perl script and the Net::DNS [net-dns] module for the DNS queries.

   The measurement script used a bind9 DNS server running on the same
   host as was performing the measurement.  The DNS cache of the server
   was flushed before each measurement run in order to detect the
   changes in the DNS records in real time.  The host, and thus the DNS
   server, was not part of DNS IPv6 whitelisting agreements.  (See
   Section 4.3 of [RFC6589] for information on DNS resolver
   whitelisting.)

   The local network where the host performing the measurements was had
   native IPv6 (dual-stack) connectivity.  The IPv6 connectivity to the
   local network was provided by an IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnel from the
   network's default router to the ISP's IPv6 peering point.

   After obtaining IP addresses for the site, if a site had both A and
   AAAA records, a simple C program was used to create TCP connections
   to port 80 (HTTP) simultaneously using both IPv4 and IPv6 to the
   (first) IP addresses discovered from the DNS.  The connection setup
   was repeated up to 10 times, giving up after the first failed attempt
   (but only after normal TCP retransmissions).  The connection setup
   delay was measured by recording the time immediately before and after
   the connect system call.  The host used for measurements was a
   regular Linux PC with a 2.6.32 version kernel and a dual-stack
   Internet connection via Ethernet.







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   The measurements were started one week before World IPv6 Day (on
   Wednesday, June 1, 17:30 UTC) and ran once every three hours until
   July 11.  One test run took from two to two-and-a-half hours to
   complete.

   The accuracy and generality of the measurement results are limited by
   several factors.  While we ran the tests at three different sites,
   most of the results discussed in this document present snapshots of
   the situation from just one measurement point, the Ericsson Research
   Finland premises, near Helsinki.  Also, since one measurement run
   took quite a long time, the network characteristics and DNS records
   might have changed even during a single run.  The first DNS response
   was used for the TCP connectivity tests, and this selection might
   have resulted in selection of a non-optimal host; yet, a slight
   preference was given to the "www" and only-domain-name records since
   their queries were started before the others.  While the host
   performing the measurements was otherwise idle, the local network was
   in regular office use during the measurements.  The connectivity
   setup delay was collected in user space, with a regular, non-real-
   time kernel implementation, resulting in small inaccuracies in the
   timing information.

4.  Measurement Results

4.1.  DNS AAAA Records

   The number of top 10,000 sites with AAAA DNS records before, during,
   and after World IPv6 Day is shown in Figure 1.  The measurements
   performed during World IPv6 Day are shown on the light gray
   background.

                               [See the PDF.]

     Figure 1: Number of sites with AAAA DNS records in the top 10,000
                            most popular sites

   When the measurements began on June 1, 245 sites (2.45%) of the top
   10,000 sites had both A and AAAA records.  During the following days,
   the number of such sites slowly increased, reaching 306 sites in the
   measurement that was started at 22:30 UTC on June 7, the evening
   before World IPv6 Day.  When World IPv6 Day officially started, the
   following measurement (at 01:30 UTC) recorded 383 sites, and the next
   one 472 sites.  During the day, the number of sites with AAAA records
   peaked at 491 (4.91% of the measured 10,000 sites), at 19:30 UTC.







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   When World IPv6 Day was over, the number of AAAA records dropped
   nearly as fast as it had increased just 24 hours earlier.  However,
   the number of sites stabilized at around 310 and did not drop below
   300 after that, resulting in over 3% of the top 10,000 sites still
   having AAAA records at the end of our measurements, on July 11.

   While 274 sites had IPv6 enabled in their DNS for some of the tested
   host names one day before World IPv6 Day, only 116 had it for the
   "www" host name that is commonly used when accessing a web site.  The
   number of "www" host names with AAAA records more than tripled during
   World IPv6 Day, reaching 374 sites for 3 consecutive measurement runs
   (i.e., for at least 6 hours).  Also, the number of AAAA records for
   the "www" host name dropped steeply after the day and remained at
   around 160 sites after that.

   Similar but more pronounced trends can be seen if only the top 100 of
   the most popular sites are taken into considerations, as shown in
   Figure 2.

                               [See the PDF.]

    Figure 2: Number of sites with AAAA DNS records in the top 100 most
                               popular sites

   Here, the number of sites with some of the tested host names having a
   AAAA record was initially 14; then, it jumped to 36 during the day
   and eventually dropped to 13.  Also, while none of the top 100 sites
   apparently had a AAAA record for their "www" host name before and
   after World IPv6 day, during the day the number peaked at 30.  Thus,
   roughly one third of the 100 most popular sites had IPv6 enabled for
   World IPv6 Day.

   Two other test sites in Sweden and Canada experienced similar trends
   with the DNS records.  However, one of the sites used an external DNS
   server that was part of whitelisting agreements.  There, the number
   of sites with AAAA records before World IPv6 Day was already higher
   (more than 400), and hence the impact of the day was smaller, because
   the amount of sites increased to the same numbers as seen by the test
   site in Finland.  With the whitelisted DNS server, the number of
   sites remained above 450 after the day.

4.2.  TCP Connection Setup

   To test whether the IP addresses given by the DNS actually provide
   connectivity to the web site and whether there is any difference in
   the connection setup delay and failure rates with IPv4 and IPv6, we
   attempted to create TCP connections for all domains that contained




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   both A and AAAA DNS records.  The fraction of sites for which the
   first DNS response gave addresses that were not accessible with TCP
   to port 80 over IPv4 or IPv6 is shown in Figure 3.

                               [See the PDF.]

      Figure 3: TCP connection setup failure ratio (for the first DNS
                                 response)

   There was a baseline failure rate with IPv4 of around 1-3% that was
   fairly static throughout the test period.  For hosts with AAAA
   records, the fraction of inaccessible sites was much higher: in the
   beginning, up to one fourth of the tested hosts did not respond to
   TCP connection attempts.  Much of this was likely due to the various
   test sites with different "IPv6 prefixes" (as discussed in
   Section 3); in the first run, more than half of the tested sites with
   AAAA records used them for the first DNS response.  Also, some of the
   hosts were not even supposed to be accessed with HTTP but provided
   AAAA records for other purposes, while some sites had clear
   configuration errors, such as localhost or link-local IPv6 addresses.

   As World IPv6 Day came closer, the number of inaccessible IPv6 sites
   decreased slowly and the number of sites with AAAA records increased
   at the same time, resulting in the failure ratio dropping to roughly
   20% before the day.  During the day, the number of IPv6 sites
   increased rapidly, but also the number of failures decreased, and
   hence, at the end of the day, the failure ratio dropped to just above
   10%.  After World IPv6 Day, when many of the participating IPv6 hosts
   were taken off-line, the fraction of failed sites for IPv6 increased.
   However, since there was no increase in the absolute number of failed
   sites, the fraction of inaccessible sites remained at a lower level,
   between 15% and 20%, than before the day.

4.3.  TCP Connection Delays

   For sites that were accessible with both IPv4 and IPv6, we measured
   the time difference between establishing a TCP connection with IPv4
   and with IPv6.  We took the median (as defined in Section 11.3 of
   [RFC2330]) of the time differences of all 10 connections, and then
   the median and mean (of the median) over all sites.  The results are
   shown in Figure 4.

                               [See the PDF.]

      Figure 4: TCP connection setup delay differences (IPv4 - IPv6)






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   In general, the delay differences were small: the median of medians
   remained less than 3 ms off from zero (i.e., IPv4 and IPv6 delays
   were equal), and even the mean, which is more sensitive to outliers,
   remained within +/-5 ms most of the time, with the greatest spikes
   reaching to roughly -15 ms (i.e., the mean of median IPv6 delays was
   15 ms larger than for IPv4 delays).  Closer inspection of the results
   shows that the spikes were often caused by only one site or a handful
   of sites with bad connectivity and multiple retransmissions of TCP
   SYN and ACK packets, resulting in connection setup delays an order of
   magnitude larger than those for the other sites.

   Surprisingly, the median delay for IPv6 connections was, in most
   cases, equal to or smaller than the IPv4 delay, but during World IPv6
   Day, the IPv6 delays increased slightly and became (as a median)
   slower than their IPv4 counterparts.  One reason for such an effect
   was that some of the sites that enabled IPv6 for World IPv6 Day had
   an extremely low IPv4 delay, less than 10 ms (e.g., due to the
   Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider hosting the IPv4 site), but a
   "regular" delay (over 100 ms) for the IPv6 host.

   More detailed analysis of the TCP connection setup delay differences,
   and the reasons for them, is left for future work.

5.  Conclusions

   World IPv6 Day had a very visible impact on the availability of
   content over IPv6, particularly when considering the top 100 content
   providers.  It is difficult to find other examples of bigger one-day
   swings in some characteristics of the Internet.  However, the impact
   on end users was small, given that when dual-stack works correctly,
   it should not be visible at the user level, and given that IPv6
   availability for end users themselves is small.

   The key conclusions are as follows:

   o  On that day, there was a large jump in the number of content
      providers providing AAAA DNS records.

   o  On that day, there was a smaller but apparently permanent increase
      in the number of content providers supporting AAAA.

   o  Large and sudden swings in the relative amount of IPv4 vs. IPv6
      traffic are possible merely by supporting a dual-stack access
      network and having a few large content providers offer their
      services either globally or to a particular network over IPv6.






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   o  A large fraction of sites that published AAAA records for a name
      under their domain (be it "www", "www6", or something else) were
      actually not responding to TCP SYN requests on IPv6.  This
      fraction was far higher than that which we've seen in our previous
      measurements, and we are still determining why that was the case.
      Measurement errors or problems on our side of the network cannot
      be ruled out at this stage.  In any case, it is also clear that as
      new sites joined, incomplete or in-progress configurations create
      more connectivity problems in the IPv6 Internet than we've seen
      before.  Other measurements are needed to verify what the general
      level of IPv6 connectivity is to addresses publicly listed in AAAA
      records.

   o  Even if the overall level of connection failures was high,
      activities on and around the IPv6 day appear to have caused a
      significant permanent drop in the number of these failures.

   o  When IPv6 and IPv4 connectivity were both available, their delay
      characteristics appeared very similar.  In other words, most of
      the providers that made IPv6 connectivity available appear to have
      provided a production-quality network.  TCP connection setup delay
      differences due to RTT differences between IPv4 and IPv6
      connections were, in general, low.  In the remaining differences
      in our measurements, random packet loss played a major role.
      However, some sites could experience considerable differences
      simply because of different content distribution mechanisms used
      for IPv4 and IPv6 content.

   It is promising that the amount of the most popular Internet content
   on IPv6 was surprisingly high, roughly one third of top 100 sites
   (during World IPv6 Day or with whitelisting enabled).  However, other
   content on the Internet forms a long tail that is harder to move to
   IPv6.  For instance, only 3% of the 10,000 most popular web sites
   provided their content over IPv6 before World IPv6 Day.  On a
   positive note, the top 100 sites form a very large part of overall
   Internet traffic [Labovitz], and thus even the top sites moving to
   IPv6 could represent a significant fraction of Internet traffic on
   IPv6.  However, this requires that users be enabled to use IPv6 in
   their access networks.  We believe that this should be the goal of
   future global IPv6 efforts.

6.  Security Considerations

   Security issues have not been discussed in this memo.







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7.  Informative References

   [RFC2330]  Paxson, V., Almes, G., Mahdavi, J., and M. Mathis,
              "Framework for IP Performance Metrics", RFC 2330, May
              1998.

   [RFC2460]  Deering, S. and R. Hinden, "Internet Protocol, Version 6
              (IPv6) Specification", RFC 2460, December 1998.

   [RFC3056]  Carpenter, B. and K. Moore, "Connection of IPv6 Domains
              via IPv4 Clouds", RFC 3056, February 2001.

   [RFC6555]  Wing, D. and A. Yourtchenko, "Happy Eyeballs: Success with
              Dual-Stack Hosts", RFC 6555, April 2012.

   [RFC6589]  Livingood, J., "Considerations for Transitioning Content
              to IPv6", RFC 6589, April 2012.

   [net-dns]  Fuhr, M., "Net::DNS", <http://www.net-dns.org/>.

   [IPv6Monitor]
              University of Pennsylvania and Comcast, "IPv6 Monitoring @
              Penn", 2012, <http://mnlab-ipv6.seas.upenn.edu/>.

   [RIPEv6Day]
              RIPE NCC, "World IPv6 Day Measurements",
              <http://v6day.ripe.net/>.

   [Alexa]    Alexa the Web Information Company, "Alexa Top 1,000,000
              Sites",
              <http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip>.

   [Labovitz]
              Labovitz, C., Iekel-Johnson, S., McPherson, D., Oberheide,
              J., and F. Jahanian, "Internet Inter-Domain Traffic",
              Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM 2010, August 2010.















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Appendix A.  Acknowledgments

   The authors would like to thank Suresh Krishnan, Fredrik Garneij,
   Lorenzo Colitti, Jason Livingood, Alain Durand, Emile Aben, Jan
   Melen, and Tero Kauppinen for interesting discussions in this problem
   space.  Thanks also to Tom Petch and Bob Hinden for thorough reviews
   and many helpful comments.

Authors' Addresses

   Ari Keranen
   Ericsson
   Jorvas  02420
   Finland

   EMail: ari.keranen@ericsson.com


   Jari Arkko
   Ericsson
   Jorvas  02420
   Finland

   EMail: jari.arkko@piuha.net



























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