Design and Implementation of V6SNIFF: an Efficient IPv6 Packet Sniffer

Packet sniffing is important in network monitoring to troubleshoot and to log network activities which will benefit both the network software engineers and network engineers. In this research work, we specifically designed and implemented a new and efficient software based IPv6 capable packet sniffer, V6SNIFF. Performance analysis has been done on two different approaches which are the libpcap implementation and raw socket implementation in designing packet sniffing software in an open source operating platform, Linux. The results have been analyzed and taken into consideration in designing V6SNIFF. Raw socket implementation outperforms the former in IPv6 packet sniffing and V6SNIFF chose it as the building platform. Performance analysis was done as well comparing our specifically designed V6SNIFF with one of the well known network analyzer, TCPDUMP. V6SNIFF outperforms the later in capturing IPv6 packets and the metrics of the performance analysis will be exhibited in this paper. This documented report contributes to other research work involving IPv6 to decide on which approaches suitable to be implemented in their context and provides an alternative tool, V6SNIFF in packet monitoring.