Temporal and Spatial Classification of Active IPv6 Addresses

Abstract

There is striking volume of World-Wide Web activity on IPv6 today. In early 2015, one large Content Distribution Network handles 50 billion IPv6 requests per day from hundreds of millions of IPv6 client addresses; billions of unique client addresses are observed per month. Address counts, however, obscure the number of hosts with IPv6 connectivity to the global Internet. There are numerous address assignment and subnetting options in use; privacy addresses and dynamic subnet pools significantly inflate the number of active IPv6 addresses. As the IPv6 address space is vast, it is infeasible to comprehensively probe every possible unicast IPv6 address. Thus, to survey the characteristics of IPv6 addressing, we perform a year-long passive measurement study, analyzing the IPv6 addresses gleaned from activity logs for all clients accessing a global CDN.