On the prevalence and characteristics of MPLS deployments in the open internet

Sommers, Joel; Barford, Paul; Eriksson, Brian

doi:10.1145/2068816.2068858

Cited by 29 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…4(b)). Indeed, under IPv4, the majority of tunnels (around 80%) exhibits a single LSE (this results is aligned with Sommers et al observations [4]) while, in IPv6, the majority of tunnels (around 80% also during the first half of the considered period) exhibits at least two labels.…”

Section: Label Stack Size Distributionsupporting

confidence: 90%

“…While encountering a few longer tunnels, MPLS IPv6 tunnels length distribution follows observations made in IPv4 [4,5].…”

supporting

confidence: 67%

“…4 The impact of AS174 in IPv6 has already been discussed in the past [24,25]. Globally speaking, we observe a different behavior between IPv4 (Fig.…”

Section: Label Stack Size Distributionmentioning

confidence: 50%

“…If the quantity of traces increases over time, on the contrary, the amount of traces involved in an MPLS tunnel remains quite stable. Compared to IPv4 [4,5,7], traceroute are traversing much less MPLS tunnels: on the order of 7-8% in IPv6 against (at least) 40% for IPv4. Note that the drop observed, in terms of number of traces seen, in early 2015, is due to less active vantage points.…”

Section: Datasetmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, Sommers et al [4] examined the characteristics of MPLS deployments that are explicitly identified using RFC4950 extensions. Donnet et al [5] provided algorithms for detecting MPLS tunnels depending on the way MPLS routers react to the ttl-propagate and RFC4950 options.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Brief History of MPLS Usage in IPv6

Vanaubel¹,

Mérindol²,

Pansiot³

et al. 2016

Passive and Active Measurement

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Abstract. Recent researches have stated the fast deployment of IPv6. It has been demonstrated that IPv6 grows much faster, being so more and more adopted by both Internet service providers but also by servers and end-hosts. In parallel, researches have been conducted to discover and assess the usage of MPLS tunnels. Indeed, recent developments in the ICMP protocol make certain categories of MPLS tunnels transparent to traceroute probing. However, these studies focus only on IPv4, where MPLS is strongly deployed. In this paper, we provide a first look at how MPLS is used under IPv6 networks using traceroute data collected by CAIDA. At first glance, we observe that the MPLS deployment and usage seem to greatly differ between IPv4 and IPv6, in particular in the way MPLS label stacks are used. While label stacks with at least two labels are marginal in IPv4 (and mostly correspond to a VPN usage), they are prevalent in IPv6. After a deeper analysis of the label stack typical content in IPv6, we show that such tunnels result from the use of 6PE. This is not really surprising since this mechanism was specifically designed to forward IPv6 traffic using MPLS tunnels through networks that are not fully IPv6 compliant. However, we show that it does not result from non dual-stack routers but rather from the absence of native IPv6 MPLS signaling protocols. Finally, we investigate a large Tier-1 network, Cogent, that stands out with an original set-up.

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Section: Label Stack Size Distributionsupporting

confidence: 90%

“…While encountering a few longer tunnels, MPLS IPv6 tunnels length distribution follows observations made in IPv4 [4,5].…”

supporting

confidence: 67%

“…4 The impact of AS174 in IPv6 has already been discussed in the past [24,25]. Globally speaking, we observe a different behavior between IPv4 (Fig.…”

Section: Label Stack Size Distributionmentioning

confidence: 50%

Section: Datasetmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

A Brief History of MPLS Usage in IPv6

Vanaubel¹,

Mérindol²,

Pansiot³

et al. 2016

Passive and Active Measurement

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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Internet Topology Discovery

Donnet

2013

Data Traffic Monitoring and Analysis

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Abstract. Since the nineties, the Internet has seen an impressive growth, in terms of users, intermediate systems (such as routers), autonomous systems, or applications. In parallel to this growth, the research community has been looking for obtaining and modeling the Internet topology, i.e., how the various elements of the network interconnect between themselves. An impressive amount of work has been done regarding how to collect data and how to analyse and model it. This chapter reviews main approaches for gathering Internet topology data. We first focus on hop limited probing, i.e., traceroute-like probing. We review large-scale tracerouting projects and discuss traceroute limitations and how they are mitigated by new techniques or extensions. Hop limited probing can reveal an IP interface vision of the Internet. We next focus on techniques for aggregating several IP interfaces of a given router into a single identifier. This leads to a router level vision of the topology. The aggregation can be done through a process called alias resolution. We also review a technique based on IGMP probing that silently collect all multicast interfaces of a router into a single probe. We next refine the router level topology by adding subnet information. We finish this chapter by discussing the AS level topology, in particular the relationships between ASes and the induced hierarchy.

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