Enhanced IPv6 ping and traceroute

Abstract

Ping and Traceroute utility has been a fundamental tool for a network service provider or an enterprise network operator to run its IPv4 network for various kinds of services, data/voice/video. However, it's known the returned result from IPv4 ping/traceroute tool cannot tell whether any link in a packet's path to its destination is congested. In this paper, a proposal to enhance IPv6 ping/traceroute utility is presented. The returned results of the enhanced IPv6 traceroute utility will carry information on link utilization of each intermediate hop. The information is particularly useful for Internet traffic crossing multiple autonomous systems and being sensitive to network congestion. Over-the-top video delivery and IP audio/video conferences are examples of QoS sensitive traffic crossing multiple ASNs in internet. The link utilization information from the enhanced IPv6 ping/traceroute tool can also be used in a measurement-based approach for dynamic QoS adaptation in wired-wireless networks. The enhanced ping/traceroute utility can also inform its user on the autonomous system number (ASN), interface ID and host/domain name of each intermediate hop. The latter capability will deem DNS and/or whois database queries based on returned IPv6 address unnecessary. In fact, the enhanced utility can be used to tell if DNS entry of a router interface is correct in DNS database. Error in DNS entry of a router interface is common due to re-IP, network migration or merger. It's known that DNS error can mislead a network operator when trouble shooting a network connectivity failure.