Network performance evaluation of IPv4-v6 configured tunnel and 6to4 transition mechanisms on windows server operating systems

The potential exhaustion of IPv4 addresses initiated the development of IPv6. The new version of the Internet Protocol offers substantially more network and host addresses, however transition from current to the new version has been remarkably slow. There are multiple reasons for the sluggish transition: complexity and enormousity being the forerunners. Thus for the interim, various transition mechanisms have been developed. Each mechanism has its associated benefits and weaknesses. In this paper two such mechanisms, namely configured tunnel and 6to4 transition mechanism, have been empirically evaluated for performance. Both mechanisms are implemented on two different Windows Server operating systems and performance related metrics like throughput, delay, jitter and CPU usage of the transition end nodes are measured. The results obtained on the test-bed show that TCP/UDP throughput and jitter values of the two mechanisms are similar, but delay and CPU reading are significantly different depending on the choice of transition mechanism and operating system.