Benchmarking methodology for stateful NAT64 gateways

Abstract

The benchmarking of Network Address and Protocol Translation from IPv6 clients to IPv4 servers (stateful NAT64) gateways is challenging from a methodological point of view because the state of the art benchmarking standards have some requirements that are conflicting when applied to stateful NAT64 gateways. In this paper, several methodological gaps are pointed out and a benchmarking methodology is proposed, which is applicable for any stateful NATxy gateways, where x and y are in {4, 6}. It bridges all the gaps by reconciling the conflicting requirements and facilitating the execution of the industry standard benchmarking measurement procedures (throughput, latency, frame loss rate, packet delay variation) with stateful NATxy gateways. New performance metrics specific to stateful testing are also defined: maximum connection establishment rate, connection tear down rate, and connection tracking table capacity. The proposed methodology is suitable for examining the scalability of the stateful NATxy gateways, too. The methodology is validated by applying it to the benchmarking of three radically different stateful NAT64 implementations: Jool, tayga plus iptables, and OpenBSD Packet Filter (PF). The details of the measurements and their results are fully disclosed.