IPv4 and IPv6 Protocols: A Comparative Performance Study

The advancement in wireless technologies has allowed devices to access the internet from virtually anywhere around the globe. However, the demand for reliable communication through voice and video streaming is significantly high. Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) is a widely used internet protocol version in the world today, but due to the shortage of IPv4 addresses in the information technology (IT) world, a new internet protocol was introduced coined Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) to address this issue. This paper aims to perform a comparative study on the performance of IPv4 and IPv6 on voice and video network traffic flow using performance metrics such as jitter, throughput, and packet loss. Accordingly, a testbed experimental environment is set-up with two hosts in client-server mode. Therefore, two scenarios (voice/video) were set-up to analyze the performance of the protocols. The result of this study shows that IPv6 has performed better than IPv4 in both experimental scenarios (voice/video).