]> China Unicom

Beijing China pangran@chinaunicom.cn

China Unicom

Beijing China zhaoj501@chinaunicom.cn

Huawei

Beijing China jinmingshuang@huawei.com

China Unicom

Beijing China zhangs366@chinaunicom.cn

Operations and Management Area v6ops Internet-Draft This document proposes an IPv6 network end-to-end monitoring and analysis framework. The aim is to address key issues existing in current IPv6 deployment monitoring, such as limited coverage, insufficient depth of analysis, and lack of cross-domain collaboration.

Introduction The emergence of IPv6 can be traced back to the 1990s, when the development of IPv6 was initiated by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to solve the problem of IPv4 address exhaustion. In 1998, the IPv6 protocol specification was published. With IPv6 adoption accelerating over the past years, the IPv6 protocol was elevated to be a Internet Standard in 2017. This document proposes an IPv6 end-to-end monitoring and analysis framework. The aim is to address key issues existing in current IPv6 deployment monitoring, such as limited coverage, insufficient depth of analysis, and lack of cross-domain collaboration. Through defining standardized data collection interfaces, multi-dimensional quality assessment metrics, and cross-domain correlation analysis models, this framework enables the assessment of IPv6 deployment quality and problem location across the entire cloud-networ-edge-terminal link.

Current IPv6 Deployment Status In today's digital age, the deployment of IPv6 has become a core driving force for network development. With the continuous expansion of network scale and the emergence of new applications, the vast address space, enhanced security, and improved network performance of IPv6 have made it a key element in network evolution. How to better deploy and promote IPv6 networks has become a widely concerned issue. As of 2023, significant strides have been made in the global deployment of IPv6. According to the statistics from the "Global IPv6 Development Report 2024", in 2023 the deployment of IPv6 networks significantly accelerated, breaking through the 30% mark in global coverage for the first time. Among leading countries, the IPv6 coverage rate has reached or approached 70%, and the percentage of IPv6 mobile traffic has surpassed that of IPv4. presents the state of IPv6 network deployment in 2022, and its Section 5 lists common challenges, such as transition mechanisms, network management and operation, performance, and customer experience. 'ETSI-GR-IPE-001' also discusses the existing gaps in IPv6-related use cases.

Problem Statement Although current analyses of insufficient IPv6 network deployment often focus on technical gaps, there is a lack of tools that can support end-to-end monitoring and analysis across clouds, networks, edges, and terminals from a practical network perspective. This gap makes it impossible to conduct multidimensional and fine-grained analyses of the shortcomings in IPv6 deployment. For example, most network domains are currently managed independently, focusing only on the shortcomings and quality issues of IPv6 deployment within a single management domain. They are unable to directly analyze data correlation between domains, making it difficult to accurately locate network quality issues

Current Approaches to Monitoring IPv6 Deployment Existing IPv6 deployment monitoring approaches include (Maybe not all are covered):

• Internet Society Pulse: Curating information about levels of IPv6 adoption in countries and networks around the world.
• Akamai IPv6 Adoption Visualization: Reviewing IPv6 adoption trends at a country or network level.
• APNIC IPv6 Measurement: Providing an interactive map that users can click on to see the IPv6 deployment rate in a particular country.
• Cloudflare IPv6 Adoption Trends: Offering insights into IPv6 adoption across the Internet.
• Cisco 6lab IPv6: Displaying IPv6 prefix data.
• Regional or National Monitoring Platforms: Examples include the NZ IPv6, the RIPE NCC IPv6 Statistics, and the USG IPv6 & DNSSEC External Service Deployment Status, among others.

The aforementioned tools are capable of providing effective statistics and visualization of IPv6 support levels. However, they do not adequately address the key problems that currently exist. The specific deficiencies are presented in the following five aspects.

Fragmented Monitoring Coverage Existing monitoring points are concentrated in the backbone network , lacking fine-grained coverage of terminals and applications.

Single-Dimensional Evaluation It mainly relies on basic indicators such as connection availability and address allocation rate, lacking a comprehensive assessment of service continuity, transmission quality, Network Element Readiness, Active IPv6 Connections, etc.

Lack of Cross-Domain Correlation The monitoring data of each network domain is isolated, making it impossible to conduct correlation analysis of end-to-end traffic paths .

Insufficient In-Depth Analysis For instance, the IPv6 transformation in some private network applications is not thorough enough, with internal application systems yet to be upgraded. This results in secondary and tertiary links, as well as multimedia content traffic, still predominantly relying on IPv4. However, there is a lack of effective deep monitoring methods to oversee these connections.

Limited Dynamic Prediction Existing models find it difficult to quantify the impact of external factors such as policies and regulations, user behavior patterns, and market dynamics on the evolution of IPv6.

IPv6 Network deployment End to End Monitoring and Analysis As a network operator, we specify an architectural framework for IPv6 end-to-end monitoring and analysis systems, defining a standardized methodology for cross-domain data correlation, multidimensional traffic analysis, and quality assessment across cloud-network-edge-device ecosystems. The framework establishes key performance indicators (KPIs), monitoring interfaces, and analyzing procedures to address IPv6 deployment challenges in heterogeneous network environments. This framework addresses these gaps through standardized data collection methods and multidimensional analysis techniques.

Framework

IPv6 Network End to End Monitoring and Analysis Platform ---------------------->----|----------<-----------------<--------- | | | | | | | | +-----------------+ +----------------+ +--------------------+ +--------------+ | Home Network |---------| Mobile Network |--------| IP bearer network |-------| Application | +-----------------+ +----------------+ +--------------------+ +--------------+ ]]>

Cross-Domain Data Integration The framework defines four critical domains. By connecting the monitoring subsystems in various fields of cloud, network, edge, and terminal, end-to-end data integration across multiple links can be achieved. * Home Network Domain: - Home gateway IPv6 capabilities - End-device Protocol Stack Status

• Mobile Network Domain:
  • Network migration flows
  • Quality
  • Network migration applications
  • End-device Protocol Stack Status
• IP bearer network Domain:
  • Home broadband and mobile network traffic flows
  • Dedicated line traffic flow direction
• Application Domain:
  • IPv6 service availability

Support multiple data collection methods (e.g., Kafka/ SFTP , NetFlow /NetStream , telemetry ) with protocol-specific configurations. Additionally, if a real-time traffic collection method is required, the Deploy IPFIX exporters at strategic nodes for flow data capture.

Multidimensional Analysis Methodology

• Network Traffic Analysis
  • Flow pattern recognition at critical nodes
  • IPv6/IPv4 traffic ratio trending
  • Subsystem-level attribution analysis
• Inter-Network Analysis
  • Regional traffic matrix construction
  • Flow direction analysis
• Application-Centric Analysis
  • Cross-domain service topology mapping
  • Quality-of-Experience (QoE) analysis
  • Application-specific traffic distribution
• Restricted Area Analysis
  • We formulate a multi-dimensional problem identification and discovery program for the network side, user side and application side, and investigate possible influencing factors at each level.

Application System Monitoring

• IPv6 Support Assessment
  • Multi-layer link accessibility
  • Secondary and tertiary link support
  • DNS resolution capability
    • AAAA record resolution rate
    • Robustness of recursive and iterative query mechanisms
• Performance Measurement
  • IPv6 connection establishment time
  • Application response time under IPv6
  • Throughput comparison (IPv6 vs IPv4)

User-Side Monitoring

• End-Device Monitoring
  • IPv6 stack implementation verification
  • Protocol preference analysis
• Quality of Experience
  • Application-specific performance metrics
  • Dual-stack quality differentials

Key Performance Indicators

• Readiness Indicators
  • Network Element Readiness
  • Application Readiness
  • Infrastructure Readiness
  • Network Readiness
  • Cloud Readiness
• Operational Metrics
  • IPv6 Traffic
  • Active IPv6 Connections
• Quality Metrics
  • DNS Resolution Performance
  • End-to-End Latency
  • Packet Loss Ratio

Function Description

• Quantify IPv6 deployment maturity through composite indices.
• Perform root-cause analysis across domains.
• Optimize development mechanisms based on Key Performance Indicators.

Use cases ## User Network Quality Question Positioning When User A experiences network congestion while playing cloud-based games at home, it affects the gaming experience. To identify the cause, it is necessary to collect performance data from each network segment for quality localization. However, current independent management of network domains prevents direct data correlation. The network segments are as follows: N1 (terminal device to ONT), N2 (ONT to BRAS), and N3 (BRAS to application side).

Network schematic diagram based on home broadband network access application |<---------------------------->|<--------------------------->| N1 N2 N3 ]]>

The end-to-end monitoring capabilities of the platform enable comprehensive data correlation and analysis, allowing for precise localization of issues and significantly enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of network quality management. By leveraging an IPv6 end-to-end network monitoring and analysis platform, we collected latency and packet loss data from N1, N2, and N3 network segments. The platform applies a metric model to precisely identify quality issues. The analysis revealed that the congestion in the critical path of N3 was the root cause of the problem. Specifically, the CDN content scheduling was switched from a local server to a remote server, which resulted in the transmission path requiring cross-network scheduling. Due to the high latency and packet loss rate of the inter-network links, the end-to-end latency and packet loss rate increased significantly.

Home terminals and router Traffic Analysis Home terminals and routers, as the "last kilometer" for users to access the Internet, play a crucial role in user experience with regard to their IPv6 support. Take a popular video application as an example. It has a large number of users in both mobile and home network environments. Within the statistical time period, the proportion of IPv6 traffic generated by mobile network users in the application is much higher than that of home network users. After a systematic analysis from multiple dimensions including the user side, network side, and application side, it was found that the IPv6 support of home terminals is insufficient.

Security Considerations The monitoring system must implement: - Role-based access control - Anonymization of user-specific data - Secure data transmission protocols - Integrity verification for collected metrics

IANA Considerations TBD.

References Normative References This document specifies version 6 of the Internet Protocol (IPv6). It obsoletes RFC 2460. Informative References This document provides an overview of the status of IPv6 deployment in 2022. Specifically, it looks at the degree of adoption of IPv6 in the industry, analyzes the remaining challenges, and proposes further investigations in areas where the industry has not yet taken a clear and unified approach in the transition to IPv6. It obsoletes RFC 6036. IPv6 offers a much larger address space than that of its IPv4 counterpart. An IPv6 subnet of size /64 can (in theory) accommodate approximately 1.844 * 10^19 hosts, thus resulting in a much lower host density (#hosts/#addresses) than is typical in IPv4 networks, where a site typically has 65,000 or fewer unique addresses. As a result, it is widely assumed that it would take a tremendous effort to perform address-scanning attacks against IPv6 networks; therefore, IPv6 address-scanning attacks have been considered unfeasible. This document formally obsoletes RFC 5157, which first discussed this assumption, by providing further analysis on how traditional address-scanning techniques apply to IPv6 networks and exploring some additional techniques that can be employed for IPv6 network reconnaissance. Knowledge and experience on how to operate IPv4 networks securely is available, whether the operator is an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or an enterprise internal network. However, IPv6 presents some new security challenges. RFC 4942 describes security issues in the protocol, but network managers also need a more practical, operations-minded document to enumerate advantages and/or disadvantages of certain choices. This document analyzes the operational security issues associated with several types of networks and proposes technical and procedural mitigation techniques. This document is only applicable to managed networks, such as enterprise networks, service provider networks, or managed residential networks. This document discusses manageability of the QUIC transport protocol and focuses on the implications of QUIC's design and wire image on network operations involving QUIC traffic. It is intended as a "user's manual" for the wire image to provide guidance for network operators and equipment vendors who rely on the use of transport-aware network functions. This document specifies the Distributed Denial-of-Service Open Threat Signaling (DOTS) signal channel, a protocol for signaling the need for protection against Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks to a server capable of enabling network traffic mitigation on behalf of the requesting client. A companion document defines the DOTS data channel, a separate reliable communication layer for DOTS management and configuration purposes. This document obsoletes RFC 8782. This document specifies the data export format for version 9 of Cisco Systems' NetFlow services, for use by implementations on the network elements and/or matching collector programs. The version 9 export format uses templates to provide access to observations of IP packet flows in a flexible and extensible manner. A template defines a collection of fields, with corresponding descriptions of structure and semantics. This memo provides information for the Internet community. This document describes an extension to the IS-IS protocol to add operational capabilities that allow for ease of management and control over IP prefix distribution within an IS-IS domain. This document enhances the IS-IS protocol by extending the information that an Intermediate System (IS) router can place in Link State Protocol (LSP) Data Units for policy use. This extension will provide operators with a mechanism to control IP prefix distribution throughout multi-level IS-IS domains. [STANDARDS-TRACK] Network telemetry is a technology for gaining network insight and facilitating efficient and automated network management. It encompasses various techniques for remote data generation, collection, correlation, and consumption. This document describes an architectural framework for network telemetry, motivated by challenges that are encountered as part of the operation of networks and by the requirements that ensue. This document clarifies the terminology and classifies the modules and components of a network telemetry system from different perspectives. The framework and taxonomy help to set a common ground for the collection of related work and provide guidance for related technique and standard developments. This document specifies the IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) protocol, which serves as a means for transmitting Traffic Flow information over the network. In order to transmit Traffic Flow information from an Exporting Process to a Collecting Process, a common representation of flow data and a standard means of communicating them are required. This document describes how the IPFIX Data and Template Records are carried over a number of transport protocols from an IPFIX Exporting Process to an IPFIX Collecting Process. This document obsoletes RFC 5101.