Empirical Analysis of IPv4 and IPv6 Protocol Performance in End-user Environment

Over the last couple of years deployment rate of IPv6 protocol has rapidly accelerated. Five years ago, the worldwide adoption rate was around 20% while nowadays goes around 36 %. Given the increasing share of IPv6-enabled devices, it is important to test and analyse end-user IPv6 performance and compare it to IPv4 performance. Such comparison will give us insight into IPv6 behaviour in the end-user environment. Simultaneous IPv4 and IPv6 testing was done in an end-user environment in Croatia, targeting 3.000 top visited IPv4 and IPv6 enabled (dual stack) domains. Testing results were used to compare reachability, packet loss, RTT based delay, hop counts and throughput of IPv4 and IPv6 traffic.