Observations of IPv6 traffic

Our understanding of IPv6 usage is quite limited. In this paper, we carry out a detailed analysis of Netflow records collected from a China Tier-1 ISP. Many aspects related to traffic attributes and deployment issues are investigated: application types, transitional technologies, interface identifier assignment schemes, etc. Dominating of video streaming and P2P traffic as well as the widely use of random identifiers for privacy are most peculiar characteristics in China's IPv6 networks. To have a better understanding of how IPv6 network is used, we studied users' behavior from several perspectives, such as the traffic volume produced by each user, number of applications he uses and the frequency he uses IPv6 networks. Results show that IPv6 is only effectively used by a small fraction of the users. On the whole, our study suggests that from our vantage point, China's IPv6 network is in the transitional phase from the initial experimental period to practical application. ©2009 IEEE.