Abstract
The different level of interest in deploying the new Internet address space
across network operators has kept IPv6 tardy in its deployment. However, since
the last block of IPv4 addresses has been assigned, Internet communities took
the concern of the address space scarcity seriously and started to move forward
actively. After the successful IPv6 test on 8 June, 2011 (World IPv6 Day [1]),
network operators and service/content providers were brought together for
preparing the next step of the IPv6 global deployment (World IPv6 Launch on 6
June, 2012 [2]). The main purpose of the event was to permanently enable their
IPv6 connectivity. In this paper, based on the Internet traffic collected from
a large European Internet Exchange Point (IXP), we present the status of IPv6
traffic mainly focusing on the periods of the two global IPv6 events. Our
results show that IPv6 traffic is responsible for a small fraction such as 0.5
% of the total traffic in the peak period. Nevertheless, we are positively
impressed by the facts that the increase of IPv6 traffic/prefixes shows a steep
increase and that the application mix of IPv6 traffic starts to imitate the one
of IPv4-dominated Internet.
