Empirical analysis and comparison of IPv4-IPv6 traffic: A case study on the campus network

With the exhaustion of global IPv4 address, IPv6 technologies have attracted increasing attention and have been deployed widely. Meanwhile, new applications running over IPv6 networks will change the traditional traffic characteristics of IPv4 networks. In this paper, we present a measurement study on the traffic features and behaviors of the users over IPv4 and IPv6 in the campus network of XJTU. We shall investigate the differences between IPv4 and IPv6 traffic features in terms of the distribution of the average packet size, flow size, flow duration, and self-similarity of the packet size and traffic volume. As to the user's behaviors, we employ the connection degree to capture the behavior characteristics and Renyi entropy to measure behavior dynamics. The experimental results based on the traffic traces collected from the Northwest Regional Center of CERNET (China Education and Research Network) indicate that there exists distinct differences between IPv4 and IPv6 traffic due to the newly-emerged applications. The analysis results provide strategic guidance for traffic management and exhibit great potential in abnormal behavior detection in next generation network.