Evaluating IPV6 on windows and solaris - Internet Computing, IEEE

In addition to increasing the address space, IPv6 was designed to address some of IPv4’s other shortcomings, including scalability and security.1,2 The protocol also supports new Internet applications that require advanced features to provide services like real-time audio and video delivery. IPv6 is now maturing and becoming more widespread, but few researchers have empirically evaluated its performance benefits and drawbacks. IPv6 replaces IPv4’s 20-byte header with a 40-byte header that allots four times as many bits for addressing (128 bits for IPv6 versus 32 bits for IPv4). The overall impact of this increase is 1.32 percent higher overhead with IPv6 for an Ethernet maximum transmission unit (MTU) size of 1,514 bytes. Theoretically, this performance overhead is minimal, but our experimental results demonstrate that the real difference between IPv4 and IPv6 is much larger than predicted. We established a test bed to compare the two protocol stacks along a set of six performance metrics. We also compared two IPv6 implementations running on Windows 2000 and Solaris 8 using identical hardware and settings. We performed additional tests using different configurations, including a pair of commercial routers that support dual IPv4–IPv6 stacks. While the majority of those results are beyond this article’s scope, some of our experiences with the routers raised points that we address here.