Abstract
As IPv6 deployment grows, it is important to develop new measurement techniques that allow us to study the IPv6 Internet. We implement an IPv6 version of the Multipath Detection Algorithm and use it from 12 geographically-distributed vantage points on two different platforms to characterize IPv6 routers that perform load balancing. Overall, we find that 74% of IPv6 routes traverse at least one router that performs load balancing. Similar to previous reports for IPv4, we find per-destination is the most prevalent type of load balancing; surprisingly, we find a significantly higher prevalence of per-packet load balancing for IPv6 traffic than previously reported for IPv4. We investigate which header fields are used for load balancing, and find that 4% of IPv6 routers that perform load balancing consider IPv6’s Traffic Class or Flow Label fields. Finally, we quantify how often routers modify the Traffic Class and Flow Label IPv6 header fields and their impact on load balancing.
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Notes
- 1.
Code available at https://www.github.com/TopologyMapping/mda6.
- 2.
More precisely, MDA computes the number of probes required to bound the probability of not detecting a next hop, across all load balancers, to \(1 - \alpha \).
- 3.
The usual 5-tuple flow definition used in IPv4 is unsuitable in IPv6 as routers need to follow the variable-length chain of IPv6 extension headers (starting at the next header field) until the end to find the TCP header.
- 4.
Dataset available at http://www.dcc.ufmg.br/~cunha/datasets.
- 5.
Available at http://www.team-cymru.org/IP-ASN-mapping.html.
- 6.
This can happen as a result of traffic engineering or, for example, when a BGP router with ECMP enabled receives and installs multiple routes to a prefix (e.g., at an IXP) or when multiple BGP routers redistribute different routes to the same prefix into an IGP (e.g., OSPF) with ECMP enabled.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Young Hyun for the support in setting up and running our measurements on the Ark platform. This work is supported by Comcast and Brazilian research funding agencies (CAPES, CNPq, and FAPEMIG).
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Almeida, R., Fonseca, O., Fazzion, E., Guedes, D., Meira, W., Cunha, Í. (2017). A Characterization of Load Balancing on the IPv6 Internet. In: Kaafar, M., Uhlig, S., Amann, J. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10176. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54328-4_18
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