6Get: Precise and Broader-Coverage Discovery of the IPv6 Network Periphery at Internet Scale

Abstract

The vastness and structural heterogeneity of the IPv6 address space fundamentally complicates the discovery of network periphery devices. Existing approaches consequently suffer from low probing precision and limited coverage, yielding an incomplete and biased view of the periphery. To address these challenges, we present 6Get, an Internet-scale active measurement method for IPv6 network periphery discovery. 6Get proposes a multi-source data mapping mechanism and an active prefix expansion mechanism to improve the precision and coverage of active-prefix generation. Using this active-prefix set, 6Get performs adaptive budget allocation and hierarchical subnet detection, substantially improving probe utilization during periphery device discovery. In real network deployments, 6Get identifies 13.76 million active /48 prefixes and 242.6 million periphery devices, achieving a probing precision of 10.41%. Compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, it achieves a <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$27.2\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> increase in coverage, a <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$7\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> improvement in probing precision, and a <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2.37\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> increase in the number of discovered periphery devices. These results show that 6Get improves Internet-scale IPv6 network periphery discovery in both precision and coverage.