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Vantage point selection for IPv6 measurements: Benefits and limitations of RIPE Atlas tags

RIPE Atlas consists of ∼9.1K probes (as of Jan 2017) connected in core, access and home networks. RIPE Atlas has recently (Jul 2014) introduced a tagging mechanism for fine-grained vantage point selection of probes. These tags are subdivided into user and system tags. User tags are based on a manual process which is largely dependent on proactive participation of probe hosts. We show that only ∼2.8% of probe hosts ever update their user tags which may lead to user tags that tend to become stale over time. System tags on the other hand being automatically assigned and frequently updated (every 4 hours) are stable and accurate. We show an application of system tags by performing a vantage point selection of dual-stacked probes. This exploration reveals that with ∼2.3K (∼26%) connected dual-stacked probes, RIPE Atlas provides the richest source of vantage points for IPv6 measurement studies. These dual-stacked probes span 88 countries and cover 822 ASNs. ∼83% of these dual-stacked probes are connected within access networks with 782 probes deployed at homes with native IPv6 connectivity. These home dual-stacked probes are evenly split across DSL, cable and fibre deployments. We show that IPv6 latencies from these probes to RIPE Atlas anchors appear comparable to IPv4, although IPv4 performs marginally better. By applying a correlation against APNIC IPv6 user population estimate, we further reveal underrepresented countries (such as BE and JP) which would benefit from deployment of more probes for IPv6 measurement studies.