A comparison of the performance of IPV4 & IPV6 infrastructure networks

Abstract

The great increase in the number of devices connected to the Internet was not predicted at the time of creation the IPv4 protocol. Due to the fast growth of the Internet, the problem of the IPv4 addresses space exhaustion has appeared. Different technologies and solutions, such as NAT and CIDR, were proposed to solve alleviated the problem for some time but now the problem has become acute. IPv6, a modified version of the IP protocol, was introduction to solve this problem but the uptake of this has been very slow. One of the major stumbling blocks of the introduction is that the conversion has to been carried as a phased implementation requiring both IPv4 and IPv6 to be supported in the network infrastructure concurrently. Tunneling technologies, which allow IPv4 and IPV6 networks to operate simultaneously, have been developed. Unfortunately the use of these tunnels has an adverse effect on the network performance. This research was conducted to discover what performance issues are associated with converting an IPv4 network to an IPv6 network. To eliminate the uncertainties related to the Internet performance a set of experiments was conducted in the laboratory network to compare the delays experienced by packets traversing IPv4 network, IPv4 network with NAT, IPv6 network and mixed networks with utilizing tunnels. Very significant variations in the delays were found when using anything other than an IPv4 network.