Despite the predicted exhaustion of unallocated IPv4 addresses between 2012 and 2014, it remains unclear how many current clients can use its successor, IPv6, to access the Internet. We propose a refinement of previous measurement studies that mitigates intrinsic measurement biases, and demonstrate a novel web-based technique using Google ads to perform IPv6 capability testing on a wider range of clients. After applying our sampling error reduction, we find that 6% of world-wide connections are from IPv6-capable clients, but only 1--2% of connections preferred IPv6 in dual-stack (dual-stack failure rates less than 1%). Except for an uptick around IPv6-day 2011 these proportions were relatively constant, while the percentage of connections with IPv6-capable DNS resolvers has increased to nearly 60%. The percentage of connections from clients with native IPv6 using happy eyeballs has risen to over 20%.

The monitoring of packets destined for routeable, yet unused, Internet addresses has proved to be a useful technique for measuring a variety of specific Internet phenomenon (e.g., worms, DDoS). In 2004, Pang et al. stepped beyond these targeted uses and provided one of the first generic characterizations of this non-productive traffic, demonstrating both its significant size and diversity. However, the six years that followed this study have seen tremendous changes in both the types of malicious activity on the Internet and the quantity and quality of unused address space. In this paper, we revisit the state of Internet ”background radiation ” through the lens of two unique data-sets: a five-year collection from a single unused /8 network block, and week-long collections from three recently allocated /8 network blocks. Through

This paper defines and evaluates Path Exploration Damping (PED) - a router-level mechanism for reducing the volume of propagation of likely transient update messages within a BGP network and decreasing average time to restore reachability compared to current BGP Update damping practices. PED selectively delays and suppresses the propagation of BGP updates that either lengthen an existing AS Path or vary an existing AS Path without shortening its length. We show how PED impacts on convergence time compared to currently deployed mechanisms like Route Flap Damping (RFD), Minimum Route Advertisement Interval (MRAI) and Withdrawal Rate Limiting (WRATE). We replay Internet BGP update traffic captured at two Autonomous Systems to observe that a PED-enabled BGP speaker can reduce the total number of BGP announcements by up to 32% and reduce Path Exploration by 77% compared to conventional use of MRAI. We also describe how PED can be incrementally deployed in the Internet, as it interacts well with prevailing MRAI deployment, and enables restoration of reachability more quickly than MRAI.