Performance analysis of IPv4/IPv6 transition techniques

IPv4 and IPv6 protocol are incompatible due to their different header structure; therefore no direct communication exists between them. For the two protocol to coexist, IETF proposed three possible solutions; Dual Stack, translation and tunnelling. This paper evaluates the performance of tunnelling and dual stack as they are the most deployed techniques. 6to4, ISATAP and 6RD were the three automatic tunnelling techniques protocol analysed. Native IPv6 and IPv4 were also examined so as to be able to observe the improvement brought by IPv6 and compare the result of IPv6 with the transition techniques. The experiment uses different measurements such as round trip time (RTT), throughput, packet loss and CPU utilisation for performance analysis. Using GNS3 as the emulator, all the configurations were implemented according to specific sets of configuration commands. The results from the testbed were used to generate the performance graphs and charts. This paper shows that Dual Stack and 6RD are better transition techniques.