IPv6 Skitter

I'm involved in a project to map the IPv6 Internet in a skitter-like fashion. By skitter-like, I mean like this.

My aim is to be able to visualise the growth and use of IPv6 in a geographic sense. I believe this is an interesting project given the phaseout of the 6bone andthe growing use of IPv6.

One of the challenging tasks of this project is to produce an address list that will give a reasonable coverage of IPv6 space. The address list is important as it gives us something to traceroute to. I've written a piece of software, called scamper, to traceroute to a list of addresses in a smart and sensible manner, which is available here.

Composing an IPv6 address list is a non-trivial task due to the vast address space available. Even though only a fraction of the available address space under 2001::/16 and 3ffe::/16 has been allocated at /32 and /35 boundaries, the remaining 96 bits can be split up and delegated by the prefix holder in random ways.