Comparison of scheduling algorithms for multimedia applications in IPv4 and IPv6

Providing guaranteed services in the Internet has become extremely essential to fulfill the requirements of the Internet users. With an increase in the number of users and demand for multimedia applications like video streaming, VoIP and video conferencing, larger bandwidth requirement increases drastically since such applications are very sensitive to delay, packet loss, and jitter. In such an environment, Quality of Service (QoS) is an important network performance parameter having a significant impact on multimedia applications. Besides other improvements, IPv6 was designed to improve QoS supported by IPv4. This paper gives a comparative analysis of three well-known queuing algorithms (First-in, First-Out-FIFO, Priority Queuing-PQ and Weighted-Fair Queuing-WFQ) which are examined to see their effects for multimedia applications in the IPv4 and IPv6 networks. OPNET is used for modeling, simulation and analyzing. Although IPv6 with PQ provides best performance for multimedia applications, IPv6 with WFQ is more appropriate when low priority traffic is also available.