Impact of IPv4-IPv6 Coexistence in Cloud Virtualization Environment

Since January 2011, IPv4 address space has exhausted and IPv6 is taking up the place as successor. Coexistence of IPv4 and IPv6 bears problem of incompatibility, as IPv6 and IPv4 headers are different from each other, thus, cannot interoperate with each other directly. The IPv6 transitioning techniques are still not mature, causing hindrance in the deployment of IPv6 and development of next generation Internet. Until IPv6 completely takes over from IPv4, they will both coexist. For IPv4-IPv6 coexistence, three solutions are possible: a) making every device dual stack, b) translation, c) tunneling. Tunneling stands out as the best possible solution. Among the IPv6 tunneling techniques, this paper evaluates the impact of three recent IPv6 tunneling techniques: 6to4, Teredo, and ISATAP, in cloud virtualization environment. In virtual networks, these protocols were implemented on Microsoft Windows (MS Windows 7 and MS Windows Server 2008) and Linux operating system. Each protocol was implemented on the virtual network. UDP audio streaming, video streaming and ICMP-ping traffic was run. Multiple runs of traffic were routed over the setup for each protocol. The average of the data was taken to generate graphs and final results. The performance of these tunneling techniques has been evaluated on eight parameters, namely: throughput, end to end delay (E2ED), jitter, round trip time (RTT), tunneling overhead, tunnel setup delay, query delay, and auxiliary devices required. This evaluation shows the impact of IPv4-IPv6 coexistence in virtualization environment for cloud computing. Keywords—virtualization; IPv4-IPv6 coexistence; IPv6 tunneling; 6to4; Teredo; ISATAP