On June 8 2011 a group of content providers, including Google, Yahoo and Facebook, are going to dual-stack their content, in an event called World IPv6 Day. This trial will enable content providers to gain experience with increased levels of IPv6 traffic and gauge the extent and effect of broken dual-stack end-users. CAIDA is cooperating with RIPE NCC’s measurements on this day, providing a dozen Ark monitors to increase the number of vantage points from which RIPE will actively test a set of dual-stacked websites for levels of IPv6 support: existence of AAAA records; ping/ping6 response; traceroute/traceroute6; and HTTP reachability.

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The final report for our workshop on Active Internet Measurements (ISMA 2011 AIMS-3) is available for viewing. The abstract:

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[Executive Summary from our annual report for 2010.]

This annual report covers CAIDA’s activities in 2010, summarizing highlights from our research, infrastructure, data-sharing and outreach activities. Our current research projects span topology, routing, traffic, economics, and policy. Our infrastructure activities support several measurement-based studies of the Internet’s core infrastructure, with focus on the health and integrity of the global Internet’s topology, routing, addressing, and naming systems.

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In light of available data on global IPv6 deployment, ISPs, and those who build equipment for them, have already accepted that multi-level network address translation (NAT, between IPv4 and IPv6 networks) is here for the foreseeable future, with all its limits on end-to-end reachability and application functionality, and its required unscalable per-protocol hacks. Whether “carrier-grade” NAT (CGN) technology supports a transition to IPv6 or becomes the endgame itself is irrelevant to the planning horizon of public companies, who must now develop sustainable business models that accommodate, if not support, IPv4 scarcity. I’ve heard a few notable predicted outcomes from engineers in the field.

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I recently remotely attended my second meeting of the FCC’s Technological Advisory Council (slides but no video archives). The chairs of four working groups created at the first TAC meeting (Critical Transitions; IPv6; Broadband Infrastructure Deployment; and Sharing Opportunities) presented their interim results. The FCC then issued a set of “TAC recommendations” (which the TAC never saw); it is mostly a wish list from industry to the FCC. Ironically, IPv6 did not appear anywhere in the recommendations, despite being the most popular topic at the first TAC meeting last November, and despite us running out of IPv4 addresses since the last TAC meeting. But the TAC’s IPv6 WG did commit to (on slide 53) delivering a report by November 2011 on what the FCC could or should do to help promote IPv6 deployment. Specifically, the WG has the following charter:

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In pursuit of more rigorous data on IPv6 deployment, CAIDA has undertaken four IPv6 measurement and analysis exercises: address allocation data; traceroute-based topology; DNS queries from root servers; and a global survey of network operators in 2008.

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Many applications require the association of Internet numbering resources with an accurate geographic label at some granularity. For some applications, knowing the country of origin might be sufficient; for others a more precise indication at state, city or zip code granularity, or even a specific latitude/longitude is needed.

However, which method(s) work best? Which database sources and services are most reliable, at what geographic resolutions? If a data source provides the geographic location of the owner of an IP address, is this location the same as the location where the device is actually broadcasting and receiving packets? And, if different, can the difference be quantified?

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This month Internet2’s new UCAN project issued a call for white papers on how they could use their $65M BTOP grant in operationally sustainable ways, i.e., so the infrastructure they build will have a chance of surviving when the federal stimulus project money runs out.

We held a relevant workshop 5 years ago, part of which was published in CommLaw the following year. I’ve also written several other essays on related issues:

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Amidst the recent political unrest in the Middle East, researchers have observed significant changes in Internet traffic and connectivity. In this article we tap into a previously unused source of data: unsolicited Internet traffic arriving from Libya. The traffic data we captured shows distinct changes in unsolicited traffic patterns since 17 February 2011.