ADOPTION OF IPV6 AROUND THE WORLD

Overview IP Around The World

Incredible growth of Internet access observed in most recent two decades has demonstrated is shown that the Internet needs to reveal and enhance in an assortment of ways, numerous fields of human including the economy, social life, and technology development. The Internet is playing the most important part in any communication systems worldwide.

1st Internet Protocol (IPv4) was designed by Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) in 1980, at that time there was no World Wide Web (WWW), no mobile devices, even most people never heard of the term Internet, hence the number of addresses provided was more than enough for the major devices like mainframe and minicomputers. The World Wide Web (WWW) was introduced in early 1990s and everyone was getting on the Internet. Internet routing tables grew rapidly up to 20,000 routes in 1994. Shown in figure 1.

BGP

Figure 1

Due to the exponential and rapid growth rate of internet users, available IPv4 addresses 32-bits (4 bytes) have been fully assigned to telecommunication companies, Internet Services Providers (ISPs) and other Internet users. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) realized that IPv4 address space would soon run out [6]. In order to slow down the running out of IPv4 address space, Internet IETF introduced some “short term solutions” i.e. Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR), Network Address Translation (NAT) and Private IPv4 address space at the residential gateway router of stub networks. CIDR leads to a more efficient use of the IP address space by dividing networks addresses into super network, which reduces the number of entries in the IP routing table as defined in RFC 1518. And NAT technique was designed to remapping one global public IP address space that is obtained from Internet Service Provider (ISP) into another by modifying the inside private IP addresses for different users. Last approach was overcome the IPv4 addresses shortage by reserving 3 blocks from each network class. In this case hosts using private addresses are not reachable from the Internet but can communicate to other peers inside the same intranet. However, each technique contains their own limitations, such as peer-to-peer communications model, complex to manage, lack of scalability and reachability problems.

Short term solutions included.

NAT (Network Address Translation) & PAT (Port Address Translation)
Private address space
CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing)

Long-term solution: IPv6

These techniques were not designed to provide internet connectivity to billions of worldwide smart devices for social and economic development in the future growth, but these were designed to support IPv4 to survive for few more years unless one moves to a new addressing structure.

Internet of Thing (IoT)

Now a day we are witnessing the technological, social and economic grounds for Internet of Thing (IoT) to become massive and new technologies are becoming prevalent in our daily life like, Smart Cities, Smart Houses, Machine to Machine (M2M), Smart wearables, Long Term Evolution (LTE) and what’s coming after. To meet with these “always-on” and are very IP-hungry, require a huge amount of IP address space to communicate over IP networks. Shown in figure 2.

iot

Figure 2

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is resolving IP address problems over the years of immense growth on Internet. It is created by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and initially was published in 1995. IPv6 provides 128-bits long addressing. In this format, 128-bits are subdivided into eight 16-bits hex blocks and each block holds 4 digits, where blocks are bifurcated by colons. Represented in figure 3.

Ipv6

Figure 3

Adoption of IPv6 around the world.

The global IP transit from IPv4 to IPv6 has started and is paving the way for the adoption of the IPng next generation Internet. Top ranking countries in the field of Information Communication and Technology (ICT) including China, European Union, US and Japan have started implementing IPv6 on their production and commercial networks

By the time Internet users growing rapidly and the ever-rising usage of new technology resources all over the world, the IP transit from (IPv4 to IPv6) is most important to help this monstrous development. It is not only due to a world human population, but new technologies are becoming more prevalent in our daily life, for example (Smart wearables devices, lights, sensors, fans, and cars). However, the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and network operators are taking significant steps to implement IPv6 within their networks to resolve current IP scalability problems, as well as providing more Internet connectivity to accommodate their future Internet usage requirement.

In this article, we will mainly focus on Internet Services Providers (ISPs), Internet Content Providers (ICPs) and Internet consumers (users) as a key procedure.The worldwide Internet Services Providers (ISPs) are migrating their legacy services to IPv6. This migration toward a native IPv6 network is driven by the need to decrease the capital use and in addition operational costs of both developing and operating individual IP network infrastructures. Recently, google revealed that as indicated by different measurements, the number of IPv6 connections are increasing constantly worldwide 35%.

Implementation of IPv6 in (ASs) Worldwide.

If we look at the data provided about the implementation of IPv6 in (ASs) worldwide, there are 54,154 Autonomous Systems (AS) numbers registered all around the world. Out of 13,947 advertising prefixes for both address families of IPv4 and IPv6, 25.8% service providers are advertising IPv6 prefixes when compared to the world averageThe Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing database statistics indicates that IPv6 represents only 34 % of the IPv6 prefixes are routed in global BGP.

IPv6 deployment measured at ICPs level.

Another important IPv6 deployment can be measured from Internet Content Providers (ICPs) at domains level as Domain Name Servers (DNSs) are also primary component of the Internet infrastructure. Since their role is to maintain A, AAAA record A record (Address Record) and AAAA (also quad-A record), such as .edu, .org, .net, .gov and .com, and also translate (resolve) domain name queries that usually received from web client and give back IP address against mapped IP addresses that will help to use in communication between Internet web hosts. When looking at the situation with Internet Domain Name Servers (DNSs), currently thirteen logical Root name servers are actively working or distributed on the Internet. Each of these Root servers are holding all Top-Level Domains (TLDs) of the Internet either of IPv4 or IPv6. If we look at TLDs data recently measured by ISOC, there are 1543 Top-Level Domains (TLDs) registered all around the world out of 519 (98.4%) TLDs are fully support both IPv4 and IPv6 domain name to access web hosts. Another important aspect that we need to check is the number of IPv6 clients using DNS servers over the Internet. According to the provided data by ISOC, there are 11.5 billion domains sites registered with AAAA records from 9.5 billion in the last year report. From these 11.5 billion sites only 7% percentage of IPv6 users requests direct accessed at Root server.

The third adoption of IPv6 can be measured while checking a situation of online IPv6 users on the Internet with the top content providers like Google, LinkedIn, Akamai, and Facebook. These companies are playing very important role in deploying IPv6 within their datacenters to decrease operational complexity and improve user experience in terms of download times. The information given by Google around an accessibility of IPv6 networks between Google clients indicate that 24.68% of IPv6 clients got to the Google substance all around the globe, as shown in figure 4. If we compare this with previous years usage from 2011 to 2016 the percentage of IPv6 users with Google contents increased from 0.25% to 10.09%. However, from 2016 to May 2021 this percentage raised from 35% to 24.68%, which is an increase by more than twice that of the previous years, 2016.

google

Figure 4

The information given by Internet Society (ISOC) in Jun 2018, shows that the world is getting ready for IPv6 traffic and this trend is shown in graph indicates overall 35% of IPv6 deployment in Internet. Also, according to report, the 24 countries having 15% higher usage of IPv6 traffic when compared to the rest of the world whereas 49 countries are one step ahead with recently deployed IPv6 within their countries. From this measurement of the IPv6 adoption progress, we can understand that the usage of IPv6 is continuously growing faster than as compared to the usage of previous years. However, numerous Internet communities like, Huawei, Google, APNIC, Akamai and Facebook, believe that there is low deployment of IPv6 and it still require more efforts in the transition to IPv6 throughout the world.

CONCLUSION.

Due to the rapid growth in new technologies, telecom sector has been changing to accommodate the growth rate based on needs. While large ISPs in world are fully realizing the present aggressive condition of telecom area in world whereby increasing demands of data services. A future situation represents a few difficulties in the market strength of world. It would be better for ISP, ICT, telcom & datacom to accept these challenges, in order to maintain its dominating position by viewing ongoing competition like a new business opportunity. Therefore, it is necessary for ISP to deploy IPv6 within their existing IPv4 network infrastructure.

References.