Impact of IPv4/IPv6 Transition Techniques on Applications Performance

Abstract

During the coexistence period between IPv4 and IPv6 networks, it is important to test the effect of using IPv6 transition techniques on applications' performance. We evaluate the performance of specific user's applications over three transition techniques: dual-stack, automatic 6to4 and manual tunneling. A set of experiments have been carried out using OPNET network simulator to evaluate the performance of five applications: web browsing, file transfer, voice, email and database access over these transition techniques and comparing with applications' performance over pure IPv4 and IPv6 networks. The finding results show varying in the applications' performance between dual-stack, automatic 6to4 tunneling, and manual 6to4 tunneling. For most applications, dual-stack performed better than tunneling regarding the response time. In some cases, tunneling performed better than dual-stack regarding other performance parameters, such as throughput and Jitter.