Investigating the IPv6 teredo tunnelling capability and performance of internet clients

Sebastian Zander, Lachlan L.H. Andrew, Grenville Armitage, Geoff Huston, George Michaelson
2012 Computer communication review  
The Teredo auto-tunnelling protocol allows IPv6 hosts behind IPv4 NATs to communicate with other IPv6 hosts. It is enabled by default on Windows Vista and Windows 7. But Windows clients are self-constrained: if their only IPv6 access is Teredo, they are unable to resolve host names to IPv6 addresses. We use web-based measurements to investigate the (latent) Teredo capability of Internet clients, and the delay introduced by Teredo. We compare this with native IPv6 and 6to4 tunnelling capability
more » ... nd delay. We find that only 6-7% of connections are from fully IPv6-capable clients, but an additional 15-16% of connections are from clients that would be IPv6-capable if Windows Teredo was not constrained. However, Teredo increases the median latency to fetch objects by 1-1.5 seconds compared to IPv4 or native IPv6, even with an optimally located Teredo relay. Furthermore, in many cases Teredo fails to establish a tunnel.
doi:10.1145/2378956.2378959 fatcat:n6gpqedornba7dv7xbmi5rfkwq