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Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Document Type

Article

Abstract

The goal of this study is to deliver both an in-depth comprehensive analysis of the current state of IPv6 adoption and an assessment of the quality of services over the IPv6 Internet. Our assessment comprises an examination of eight data sets used to produce a comprehensive picture of IPv6 adoption across 12 metrics. We assessed the quality of services over the IPv6 Internet using eight globally distributed monitoring agents to compare the HTTP load times to targeted websites over IPv6 and IPv4. The results of our analysis confirm the findings of previous studies showing that IPv6 is in an accelerating adoption phase and that the IPv6 Internet is maturing in its ability to deliver quality of services on a par to IPv4. The long anticipated exhaustion of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) IPv4 global address pool occurred in February of 2011. Since that time, four of the five regional Internet registries (RIRs) have also exhausted their IPv4 address pools, leaving the African Network Information Centre as the only RIR with a pool of IPv4 addresses remaining for general allocation. As the availability of IPv4 addresses continues to diminish, the adoption and use of IPv6 is rapidly increasing. However, the quality of IPv6 deployments and implementations is not always equal, which can cause user experiences over the IPv6 Internet to suffer. For this reason, ongoing monitoring and measurement are essential to provide a comprehensive picture of IPv6 adoption and to evaluate the quality of services over IPv6.

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