Analytical Performance Evaluation of IPv6 and IPv4 Over 10 Gigabit Ethernet and InfiniBand using IPoIB

IPv6 is the response to the shortage of IPv4 addresses. It was defined almost twenty years ago by the IETF as a replacement of IPv4, and little by little, it is becoming more preponderant as the Internet protocol. The growth of Internet has led to the development of high performance networks. On one hand, Ethernet has evolved significantly and today it is common to find 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks in LANs. On the other hand, another approach for high performance networking is based on RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) which offers innovative features such as kernel bypass, zero copy, offload of splitting and assembly of messages in packets to the CAs (Channel Adapters), etc. InfiniBand is currently the most popular technology that implements RDMA. It uses verbs instead of sockets and a big effort of the community is required to port TCP/IP software to InfiniBand, to take advantage of its benefits. Meanwhile, IPoIB (IP over InfiniBand) is a protocol that has been proposed and permits the execution of socket-based applications on top of InfiniBand, without any change, at the expense of performance. In this paper, we make a performance evaluation of IPv6 and IPv4 over 10 Gigabit Ethernet and IPoIB. Our results show that 10 Gigabit Ethernet has a better throughput than IPoIB, especially for small and medium payload sizes. However, as the payload size increases, the advantage of 10 Gigabit Ethernet is reduced in comparison to IPoIB/FDR. With respect to latency, IPoIB did much better than 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Finally, our research also indicates that in a controlled environment, IPv4 has a better performance than IPv6. Keywords—IPv4; IPv6; Performance Evaluation; InfiniBand; IP over InfiniBand; 10 Gigabit Ethernet; Benchmarking Tools