A Comparative Performance Study of IPv6 Transitioning Mechanisms - NAT-PT vs. TRT vs. DSTM

One of the major challenges faced by the IPv6 community in recent years has been to define the scenarios in which transitioning mechanisms should be used and which ones should be selected given a specific scenario. This paper aims to supplement this by presenting the results of a comparative evaluation carried out on three major IPv6 interoperation mechanisms; NAT-PT, TRT and DSTM. This work attempts not only to determine the outright performance of each mechanism against the other but also against a theoretical evaluation of the specification. Our results show that while DSTM performs well both NAT-PT and TRT place significant overheads on the network.