Analysis and Prediction of the IPv6 Traffic over Campus Networks in Shanghai

With the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, research on the adoption, deployment, and prediction of IPv6 networks becomes more and more significant. This paper analyzes the IPv6 traffic of two campus networks in Shanghai, China. We first conduct a series of analyses for the traffic patterns and uncover weekday/weekend patterns, the self-similarity phenomenon, and the correlation between IPv6 and IPv4 traffic. On weekends, traffic usage is smaller than on weekdays, but the distribution does not change much. We find that the self-similarity of IPv4 traffic is close to that of IPv6 traffic, and there is a strong positive correlation between IPv6 traffic and IPv4 traffic. Based on our findings on traffic patterns, we propose a new IPv6 traffic prediction model by combining the advantages of the statistical and deep learning models. In addition, our model would extract useful information from the corresponding IPv4 traffic to enhance the prediction. Based on two real-world datasets, it is shown that the proposed model outperforms eight baselines with a lower prediction error. In conclusion, our approach is helpful for network resource allocation and network management.