An investigation into teredo and 6to4 transition mechanisms: Traffic analysis

The exhaustion of IPv4 address space increases pressure on network operators and content providers to continue the transition to IPv6. The IPv6 transition mechanisms such as Teredo and 6to4 allow IPv4 hosts to connect to IPv6 hosts. On the other hand, they increase network complexity and render ineffective many methods to observe IP traffic. In this paper, we modified our flow-based measurement system to involve transition mechanisms information to provide full IPv6 visibility. Our traffic analysis focuses on IPv6 tunneled traffic and uses data collected over one week in the Czech national research and education network. The results expose various traffic characteristics of native and tunneled IPv6 traffic, among others the TTL and HOP limit distribution, geolocation aspect of the traffic, and list of Teredo servers used in the network. Furthermore, we show how the traffic of IPv6 transition mechanisms has evolved since 2010.