The exhaustionof IPv4 has gained significant attention since the APNIC (Asia Paci?c NetworkInformation Centre) announcement in February 2011 regarding the allocation ofthe last two /8 address blocks from Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. TheInternet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) with an extended address space is proposedto meet the addressing shortage experienced in IPv4. The new version is animprovement over the previous version, while keeping many of thecharacteristics of the earlier protocol. IPv6 is designed to have manyadditional features such as optional IP headers, class and flow labels, largedatagrams and fragmentation-less data transfer.
Thus, the aim is to replace theolder version of the IPv4 protocol, to meet the increasing demand for IPaddresses and to use the new features offered by the new version. However, dueto the vast success and wide spread use of the World Wide Web, the monetarycost and time involved, the transition to IPv6 is occurring gradually asopposed to a sudden conversion. The two protocol stacks are expected to coexistfor an extended period and to be supported by almost every host. Over the pastfew years, there has been a global scale deployment of IPv6 in many countries.This support for both the protocols means a host can be reached by both thestacks, IPv4 and IPv6. Both protocols may or may not follow the same networkpath based on the underlying network infrastructure. Even though IPv6 nodeshave increased in recent years, there has not been a corresponding increase inapplications using or switching to the IPv6 protocol. With relatively lighttraffic load on IPv6 and abundant IPv6 backbone bandwidth, there is a highprobability of greater IPv6 Bandwidth availability than IPv4.
Additionally,there are still large IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnels widely in use where native IPv6connectivity is not available. IPv6 events have been organized since then tofurther promote the usage of IPv6. It was suggested during the early scientificresearch that IPv6 may have a higher Round-Trip-Time between two nodes as wellas higher packet-loss while in transit, whereas recent research advocate thatthe performance is similar to IPv4 performance. The paper makes use of RIPE Atlas platform. RIPE Atlas has a network ofprobes with internet connectivity and reachability which provides aunderstanding of the internet in real time. There are thousands of activeprobes available at different geographical location which can be used toperform different measurements such as ping, Traceroutes. It collects data from this probe and providesvisualization based on the results.
The probes can be hosted not only in datacenters, but also in the homes of the volunteers. The GPS coordinates of thenode are submitted by every Atlas Probe owner to RIPE by accurately selecting his/hernode position on a digital map. The accuracy of these locations is thereforelikely to be precise because owners will enter their building address insteadof using a geolocation database to
