IPv4 versus IPv6 - who connects faster?

Author

Bajpai, Vaibhav ; Schonwalder, Jurgen

Author_Institution

Comput. Sci., Jacobs Univ. Bremen Germany, Germany

fYear

2015

fDate

20-22 May 2015

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

9

Abstract

We compare IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity of dual-stacked hosts using a metric that measures Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection establishment time to 100 popular dual-stacked websites. We have deployed an implementation of this metric on 20 SamKnows probes connected to dual-stacked networks that are part of 18 different Autonomous Systems (AS). Using a year-long dataset gathered from these vantage points, we show how most of these websites centralise around Content Delivery Network (CDN) deployments and consequently show similar performance. We show that these CDN clusters are different for IPv4 and IPv6. Furthermore, some of these websites tend to be served by CDN caches deployed within service provider networks. We show how these CDN caches are largely absent over IPv6. The distributions of TCP connect times show how clusters serving popular websites over IPv6 have improved over time. We also illustrate cases where network policies inhibit hosts from connecting to websites over IPv6.

Keywords

IP networks; Web sites; computer network performance evaluation; transport protocols; CDN caches; CDN clusters; CDN deployments; IPv4 connectivity; IPv6 connectivity; SamKnows probes; TCP connect times distributions; TCP connection establishment time; autonomous systems; content delivery network; dual-stacked Websites; dual-stacked hosts; dual-stacked networks; network policies; service provider networks; transmission control protocol; Current measurement; Google; Internet; Probes; Protocols; Time measurement;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking), 2015

Conference_Location

Toulouse

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IFIPNetworking.2015.7145323

Filename

7145323