IPv4 versus IPv6 - who connects faster?
Vaibhav Kumar Bajpai, Jürgen Schönwälder · 2015
We compare IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity of dual-stacked hosts using a metric that measures Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection establishment time to 100 popular dual-stacked websites. We have deployed an implementation of this metric on 20 SamKnows probes connected to dual-stacked networks that are part of 18 different Autonomous Systems (AS). Using a year-long dataset gathered from these vantage points, we show how most of these websites centralise around Content Delivery Network (CDN) deployments and consequently show similar performance. We show that these CDN clusters are different for IPv4 and IPv6. Furthermore, some of these websites tend to be served by CDN caches deployed within service provider networks. We show how these CDN caches are largely absent over IPv6. The distributions of TCP connect times show how clusters serving popular websites over IPv6 have improved over time. We also illustrate cases where network policies inhibit hosts from connecting to websites over IPv6.