Performance Evaluation of IPv4 VS. IPv6

摘要

Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is the new version of the Internetworking Protocol (IP). It is designed by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to overcome the problem imposed by the lack of IP addresses. IPv6 is anticipated to replace the current version of IP (IPv4). In today's business environment, running business processes is highly dependent on computer applications. Communications and computer networks serve as the infrastructure for these business-supporting applications. Poor network performance will degrade the performance of these applications, and as a result, degrade business productivity. Since network performance is one of the most important issues in toady's networking environment; there is a need to evaluate the performance of IPv6 compared to that of IPv4. Theoretically, the overhead between IPv4 and IPv6 should be directly proportional to the difference in the packet header size, and therefore both protocols should have similar performance. The following simulation study is an effort to quantitatively evaluate the performance of IPv6 compared to that of IPv4 and to investigate how different applications will perform in the IPv6 environment. A comparative analysis is provided for a network running IPv4 and a network running IPv6.