Map Discovery Procedures in Internet Protocol Version 6

Abstract— With the aim of mapping the Internet in its ver- sion 6, a mechanism useful to discover network topology is pro- posed. An interesting feature supported by IPv6 is the source- routing capability, which permits to specify a list of routers that the packet must cross before reaching the destination. This op- tion can be used to drive the discovery of interconnections at the network layer: source-routing allows to probe the exact shape of a path, avoiding the disruptive effect of route changes that usu- ally cause problems during detection. The discovery is performed by considering a set of target stations and identifying all paths between the source and each target. Subsequently, difficult-to- find intermediate connections are discovered by source-routed probes. The proposed algorithm has been implemented and tested. An example of map discovery is reported and discussed