Measuring TCP connection establishment times of dual-stacked web services

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has developed protocols that promote a healthy IPv4 and IPv6 co-existence. The happy eyeballs algorithm for instance, provides recommendations to application developers to help prevent bad user experience in situations where IPv6 connectivity is broken. In this paper, we compare the IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity of a dual-stacked host using a metric that measures the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection establishment time to a number of popular web services. We witnessed several cases where the connection establishment times and their variations over IPv6 are higher.