Evaluating IPv6 in Peer-to-Peer Gigabit Ethernet for TCP using Modern Windows and Linux Systems

Abstract

IPv6 is the next generation Internet protocol that is already in process of replacing the current IPv4 on corporate networks worldwide. Most of the latest MS Windows and Linux-based client/server operating systems (OSs) support IPv6. However, deploying IPv6 in a corporate network requires an evaluation to determine which modern OS will give the best bandwidth-latency for TCP applications. The main objective of this paper is to evaluate IPv6 against IPv4 in a peer-to-peer Gigabit Ethernet for TCP using four of the latest Windows and Linux systems and to find out the OS that provides the best system performance over IPv6 networks. It is obvious that implementing IPv6 on a Gigabit Ethernet will have drawbacks of lower bandwidth and higher latency as a result of its larger address space. In this paper the authors quantify the performance degradation of IPv6 using empirical study. They measure the quality of service (QoS) parameters, such as TCP throughput, round-trip-time, jitter, and CPU utilization using a customized testbed setting. The effect of packet length on system performance is also reported. The analysis and empirical results reported in this paper provide some insights into IPv6 performance with respect to the impact of modern client/server OS on system performance. This study may help network researchers and engineers to overcome the remaining challenging issues in the deployment of IPv6 on corporate networks.