measuring effects of happy eyeballs

Sat Jun 25 16:55:52 UTC 2016

Dear NANOG,

A paper on measuring the effects of happy eyeballs [RFC 6555] just got
accepted last week. This uses a 3-years long ('13 - '16) dataset of TCP
connect times towards ALEXA top 10K websites collected from 80 dual-stacked
SamKnows probes.  We just released [a] the paper. Thought to share it along:

[a] http://goo.gl/JmKEax

Feedback most welcome!

You may recall preliminary versions of this work at RIPE 66 [b] and IETF 87 [c].

[b] https://ripe66.ripe.net/archives/video/1208
[c] https://vimeo.com/71407427

Measuring the Effects of Happy Eyeballs
---------------------------------------

The IETF has developed protocols that promote a healthy IPv4 and IPv6
co-existence. The Happy Eyeballs (HE) algorithm, for instance, prevents bad
user experience in situations where IPv6 connectivity is broken. Using an
active test (happy) that measures TCP connection establishment times, we
evaluate the effects of the HE algorithm. The happy test measures against
ALEXA top 10K websites from 80 SamKnows probes connected to dual-stacked
networks representing 58 different ASes. Using a 3-years long (2013 - 2016)
dataset, we show that TCP connect times to popular websites over IPv6 have
considerably improved over time. As of May 2016, 18% of these websites are
faster over IPv6 with 91% of the rest at most 1 ms slower. The historical
trend shows that only around 1% of the TCP connect times over IPv6 were ever
above the HE timer value (300 ms), which leaves around 2% chance for IPv4 to
win a HE race towards these websites. As such, 99% of these websites prefer
IPv6 connections more than 98% of the time. We show that although absolute TCP
connect times (in ms) are not that far apart in both address families, HE with
a 300 ms timer value tends to prefer slower IPv6 connections in around 90% of
the cases. We show that lowering the HE timer value to 150 ms gives us a
margin benefit of 10% while retaining same preference levels over IPv6.

Best, Vaibhav

===================================
Vaibhav Bajpai
www.vaibhavbajpai.com

Room 91, Research I
School of Engineering and Sciences
Jacobs University Bremen, Germany
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