Analytical performance evaluation of native IPv6 and several tunneling technics using benchmarking tools

The central pool of IPv4 addresses managed by IANA was depleted in February 2011. A similar situation will soon happen at the level of LACNIC, the local RIR for South America. Therefore, it is necessary to deploy the new version of the Internet Protocol (IPv6) which dramatically expands the address space. However, this deployment must be done gradually and consequently. Many transition technics have been proposed, with different operational theory and availability according to the network environment. For this reason, it is important to evaluate the performance of these transition technics to help network administrators and researchers in their selection. In this paper, we present a performance comparison of some tunneling mechanisms such as ISATAP, 6to4, 6rd, and Teredo in real testbeds. The RTT and the throughput for UDP and TCP are measured for every mechanism for both Ethernet and Fast Ethernet technologies. From this research, we can conclude that ISATAP presents the best performance and Teredo can be seen as a last resort solution since it has a high overhead.