Fostering IPv6 Migration Through Network Quality Differentials

Although IPv6 has been the next generation Internet protocol for nearly 15 years, new evidences indicate that transitioning from IPv4 to IPv6 is about to become a more pressing issue. This paper attempts to quantify if and how such a transition may unfold. The focus is on ``connectivity quality,\u27\u27 e.g., as measured by users\u27 experience when accessing content, as a possible incentive (or disincentive) for migrating to IPv6, and on ``translation costs\u27\u27 (between IPv6 and IPv4) that Internet Service Providers will incur during this transition. The paper develops a simple model that captures some of the underlying interactions, and highlights the ambiguous role of translation gateways that can either help or discourage IPv6 adoption. The paper is an initial foray in the complex and often puzzling issue of migrating the current Internet to a new version with which it is incompatible

Fostering IPv6 Migration Through Network Quality Differentials

Although IPv6 has been the next generation Internet protocol for nearly 15 years, new evidences indicate that transitioning from IPv4 to IPv6 is about to become a more pressing issue. This paper attempts to quantify if and how such a transition may unfold. The focus is on connectivity quality, e.g., as measured by users\u27 experience when accessing content, as a possible incentive (or disincentive) for migrating to IPv6, and on translation costs (between IPv6 and IPv4) that Internet Service Providers will incur during this transition. The paper develops a simple model that captures some of the underlying interactions, and highlights the ambiguous role of translation gateways that can either help or discourage IPv6 adoption. The paper is an initial foray in the complex and often puzzling issue of migrating the current Internet to a new version with which it is incompatible

Migrating to IPv6 - The Role of Basic Coordination

The need for a larger Internet address space was acknowledged early on, and a solution (IPv6) standardized years ago. Its adoption has, however, been anything but easy and still faces significant challenges. The situation begs the questions of why has it been so difficult? and what could have been (or still be) done to facilitate this migration? There has been significant recent interest in those questions, and the paper builds on a line of work based on technology adoption models to explore them. The results confirm the impact of several known factors, but also provide new insight. In particular, they highlight the destabilizing effect of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offering competing alternatives (to IPv6), and demonstrate the benefits of even minimum coordination among them in offering IPv6 as an option. The findings afford additional visibility into what affects technology transition in large systems with complex dependencies such as the Internet

Migrating the Internet to IPv6: An Exploration of the When and Why

The paper documents and to some extent elucidates the progress of IPv6 across major Internet stakeholders since its introduction in the mid 90’s. IPv6 offered an early solution to a well-understood and well-documented problem IPv4 was expected to encounter. In spite of early standardization and awareness of the issue, the Internet’s march to IPv6 has been anything but smooth, even if recent data point to an improvement. The paper documents this progression for several key Internet stakeholders using available measurement data, and identifies changes in the IPv6 ecosystem that may be in part responsible for how it has unfolded. The paper also develops a stylized model of IPv6 adoption across those stakeholders, and validates its qualitative predictive ability by comparing it to measurement data

On the Adoption Dynamics of Internet Technologies: Models and Case Studies

Today, more than any time in history, our life-styles depend on networked systems, ranging from power grids to the Internet and social networks. From shopping online to attending a conference via P2P technologies, the Internet is changing the way we perform certain tasks, which incentivizes more users to join the network. This user population growth as well as higher demand for a better access to the Internet call for its expansion and development, and therefore, fuel the emergence of new Internet technologies. However, many such technologies fail to get adopted by their target user population due to various technical or socio-economical problems. Understanding these (adoption) problems and the factors that play a significant role in them, not only gives researchers a better insight into the dynamics of Internet technology adoption, but also provides them with enhanced guidelines for designing new Internet technologies. The primary motivation of this thesis is, therefore, to provide researchers and network technology developers with an insight into what factors are responsible for, or at least correlated with, the success or failure of an Internet technology. We start by delving deeply into (arguably) the salient adoption problem the Internet has faced in its 40+ years of existence, and continues to face for at least a foreseeable future, namely, IPv6 adoption. The study is composed of an extensive measurement component, in addition to models that capture the roles of different Internet stakeholders in the adoption of IPv6. Then, we extend it to a broad set of Internet protocols, and investigate the factors that affect their adoptions. The findings show performance as the primary factor that not only affected the adoption of IPv6, but also plays a role in the adoption of any other network data plane protocol. Moreover, they show how backward compatibility as well as other factors can affect the adoption of various protocols. The study provides a number of models and methodologies that can be extended to other similar problems in various research areas, such as network technology adoption and design, two-sided markets, and network economics

Technology diffusion in communication networks

The deployment of new technologies in the Internet is notoriously difficult, as evidence by the myriad of well-developed networking technologies that still have not seen widespread adoption (e.g., secure routing, IPv6, etc.) A key hurdle is the fact that the Internet lacks a centralized authority that can mandate the deployment of a new technology. Instead, the Internet consists of thousands of nodes, each controlled by an autonomous, profit-seeking firm, that will deploy a new networking technology only if it obtains sufficient local utility by doing so. For the technologies we study here, local utility depends on the set of nodes that can be reached by traversing paths consisting only of nodes that have already deployed the new technology. To understand technology diffusion in the Internet, we propose a new model inspired by work on the spread of influence in social networks. Unlike traditional models, where a node's utility depends only its immediate neighbors, in our model, a node can be influenced by the actions of remote nodes. Specifically, we assume node v activates (i.e. deploys the new technology) when it is adjacent to a sufficiently large connected component in the subgraph induced by the set of active nodes; namely, of size exceeding node v's threshold value \theta(v). We are interested in the problem of choosing the right seedset of nodes to activate initially, so that the rest of the nodes in the network have sufficient local utility to follow suit. We take the graph and thresholds values as input to our problem. We show that our problem is both NP-hard and does not admit an (1-o(1) ln|V| approximation on general graphs. Then, we restrict our study to technology diffusion problems where (a) maximum distance between any pair of nodes in the graph is r, and (b) there are at most \ell possible threshold values. Our set of restrictions is quite natural, given that (a) the Internet graph has constant diameter, and (b) the fact that limiting the granularity of the threshold values makes sense given the difficulty in obtaining empirical data that parameterizes deployment costs and benefits. We present algorithm that obtains a solution with guaranteed approximation rate of O(r^2 \ell \log|V|) which is asymptotically optimal, given our hardness results. Our approximation algorithm is a linear-programming relaxation of an 0-1 integer program along with a novel randomized rounding scheme.National Science Foundation (S-1017907, CCF-0915922

Understanding IPv6 resistance: A model of resistance among Indonesian organizations

Since its inception in the 1970s, the Internet’s underlying protocol, IPv4, has been incredibly successful; however, the massive and unanticipated growth of the Internet has revealed its limitations. IPv6 was developed as a solution, but despite having many technological improvements its adoption remains very rare. This research examines organizational resistance to IPv6 and proposes an IPv6 Resistance Model which has been developed, empirically tested and validated in the context of Indonesian organizations

A Brave New World: Studies on the Deployment and Security of the Emerging IPv6 Internet.

Recent IPv4 address exhaustion events are ushering in a new era of rapid transition to the next generation Internet protocol---IPv6. Via Internet-scale experiments and data analysis, this dissertation characterizes the adoption and security of the emerging IPv6 network. The work includes three studies, each the largest of its kind, examining various facets of the new network protocol's deployment, routing maturity, and security. The first study provides an analysis of ten years of IPv6 deployment data, including quantifying twelve metrics across ten global-scale datasets, and affording a holistic understanding of the state and recent progress of the IPv6 transition. Based on cross-dataset analysis of relative global adoption rates and across features of the protocol, we find evidence of a marked shift in the pace and nature of adoption in recent years and observe that higher-level metrics of adoption lag lower-level metrics. Next, a network telescope study covering the IPv6 address space of the majority of allocated networks provides insight into the early state of IPv6 routing. Our analyses suggest that routing of average IPv6 prefixes is less stable than that of IPv4. This instability is responsible for the majority of the captured misdirected IPv6 traffic. Observed dark (unallocated destination) IPv6 traffic shows substantial differences from the unwanted traffic seen in IPv4---in both character and scale. Finally, a third study examines the state of IPv6 network security policy. We tested a sample of 25 thousand routers and 520 thousand servers against sets of TCP and UDP ports commonly targeted by attackers. We found systemic discrepancies between intended security policy---as codified in IPv4---and deployed IPv6 policy. Such lapses in ensuring that the IPv6 network is properly managed and secured are leaving thousands of important devices more vulnerable to attack than before IPv6 was enabled. Taken together, findings from our three studies suggest that IPv6 has reached a level and pace of adoption, and shows patterns of use, that indicates serious production employment of the protocol on a broad scale. However, weaker IPv6 routing and security are evident, and these are leaving early dual-stack networks less robust than the IPv4 networks they augment.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120689/1/jczyz_1.pd