Utilizing destination options header to resolve IPv6 alias resolution

Constructing a router-level topology map of an IPv6 network is important for understanding the internal properties of IPv6 networks, building new applications, network management, etc. However, the well-known topology discovery tool, traceroute6, can only obtain interface-level topology information, which creates a significant problem known as IPv6 alias resolution. Though the inaccuracy and incompleteness of IPv6 alias resolution affects almost all the topological characteristics of the resulting router-level topology map, IPv6 alias resolution techniques have not been widely researched. In this paper, we present one novel method, which utilizes the new characteristic of a destination options header to find aliases. Given n interfaces, this method introduces O(n) number of packets into the network and can effectively group these interfaces into routers. Our experimental evaluation on the real IPv6 networks shows that, compared to the address-based method with source routing, our method is also accurate and increases the success rate of finding aliases by 49.1%. In addition, both methods can be used together to improve the completeness of alias resolution. We also believe that our method can be more effective when multiple vantage points are used.