Evaluation of 6to4 and ISATAP on a test LAN

Coexistence of IPv4 and IPv6 bears problem of incompatibility, as IPv6 and IPv4 headers are different from each other. To counter this problem, three solutions are possible: a) making every device dual stack, b) translation, c) tunneling. Tunneling stands out as the best possible solution. Among the IPv6 tunneling techniques, this paper evaluates the performance of two recent IPv6 tunneling techniques: 6to4 and ISATAP. These protocols were implemented on real test bed setup, on Microsoft Windows (MS Windows XP and MS Windows Server 2003) and Linux operating systems. Five to six devices were used to setup the whole test bed. Each protocol was then implemented on the setup using specific configuration commands, available online at various sources. UDP based audio streaming, video streaming, and TCP based ICMP-ping traffic was run. Four different runs of IPv6 traffic were routed over the setup for both IPv6 tunneling protocols. The average of the data was taken to generate graphs and final results. The performance of these tunneling techniques has been evaluated through certain parameters, namely: throughput, end to end delay (E2ED), round trip time (RTT), and jitter.