Observations of IPv6 traffic on a 6to4 relay

ABSTRACT

FUNET has been operating a public, globally-used 6to4 (RFC 3056) relay router since November 2001. The traffic has been logged and is now analyzed to gather information of 6to4 and IPv6 deployment.Among other figures, we note that the number of 6to4 capable nodes has increased by an order of magnitude in half a year: in April 2004, there are records of about 2 million different 6to4 nodes using this particular relay. Vast majority of this is just testing the availability of the relay, done by the Microsoft Windows systems, but the real traffic has also increased over time.While the observed 6to4 traffic has typically consisted of relatively simple system-level applications, or applications by power users, the emergence of peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent was also observed.

REFERENCES

• 1: Carpenter, B. and Moore, K., Connection of IPv6 Domains via IPv4 Clouds, RFC3056, February 2001.
• 2: Huitema, C., Teredo: Tunneling IPv6 over UDP through NATs, draft-huitema-v6ops-teredo-03.txt, work-in-progress.
• 3: Huitema, C., An Anycast Prefix for 6to4 Relay Routers, RFC3068, June 2001.
• 4: Malone, D., Counting 6to4 Relay Routers, Unpublished. An earlier version is available at http://ops.ietf.org/lists/v6ops/v6ops.2004/msg00253.html
• 5: Thaler, D. and Talwar, M., Personal Communication, May 2004.
• 6: Microsoft, About PNRP, Microsoft Platform SDK, Peer-to-Peer Infrastructure; on MSDN web site.
• 7: Cisco, NetFlow, http://www.cisco.com/go/netflow, referred May 2004.
• 8: Nevil Brownless, NeTraMet, http://www.auckland.ac.nz/net/NeTraMet/, referred January 2005.
• 9: Microsoft, Microsoft's Objectives for IP Version 6, http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinfo/overview/ipv6.mspx, referred January 2005.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.3 Network Operations

General Terms:
Measurement

Keywords:
6to4, IPv6, IPv6 transition