Performance Evaluation of IPv6/IPv4 Deployment over Dedicated Data Links

The future IP networks are expected to use IPv6 rather than IPv4, because IPv6 has been designed to satisfy the future network quality of service (QoS) requirements and IPv6 network offers significant advantages over the current IPv4 network. It will take certain time to change from IPv4 to IPv6. Therefore, IPv4 and IPv6 will coexist during the transition period. In this research, we adopt the dual stack transition mechanism (dstm) to study network performance with four types of traffic sources: VoIP IPv4, Internet IPv4, FTP IPv6 and MPEG-4 IPv6 for both video and audio. The performance evaluation criteria are Bandwidth, Throughput, the percentage of Dropped Packet, and mean end-to-end delay of each traffic flow for both IPv4 and IPv6. All the simulations are performed by using the network simulator 2 (ns-2). The simulation results show that, when the traffic density of IPv6 session increases, the bandwidth of IPv6 session increases at the expense of the decrement of the bandwidth of IPv4 session. On the other hand, the increment of the traffic density of IPv4 session does not increase its bandwidth due to its lower priority. In addition, the increment of packet size of IPv6 traffic results in the increment a little bit of the Mean End-to-End Delay. However, this is not the case for IPv4 traffic