Does IPv6 Improve the Scalability of the Internet?

• Authors: Philippe Owezarski
• Venue: IDMS/PROMS 2002 Proceedings of the Joint International Workshops on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems and Protocols for Multimedia Systems: Protocols and Systems for Interactive Distributed Multimedia
• Year: 2002

The Internet is growing very fast since 10 to 20 years, following an exponential increase. Some scalability issues start to arise in the Internet. A well known one is related to IPv4 addresses exhaustion, that should make the Internet growth stop. Because an access to the Internet is a very strong need for many people, the Internet growth continues thanks to some additional mechanisms as NAT for example. An other important scalability issue, not well known by most of Internet services users concerns the explosion of routing tables that are growing very fast (their size went from 15,000 to 150,0000 entries during the 6 last years), then limiting the Internet performance and scalability by increasing the routing table lookup time, and then reducing routing performances. IPv6 has been designed to cope with such scalability issues (addresses exhaustion and routing table explosion). This paper proposes a monitoring study of some BGP routing tables to analyze the reasons of this huge growth of the number of entries in routing tables. This paper then gives quantitative analysis of the reasons why all routing tables prefixes cannot be aggregated, speaking then of the consequences of NAT, multi-homing, load balancing, broken addresses hierarchy, etc. on routing tables sizes. This paper also presents some of the threats for IPv6 whose deployment in the Internet is so slow, and this point is analyzed in relation with the current strong scalability issues of the Internet.