End-to-end measurements on performance penalties of IPv4 options

IP version 4 specifies options that extend the basic IP header and also allow new functions to be added to IP without breaking existing implementations. Since options must always be inspected at routers, it is generally believed that routers prioritize ordinary packets over packets carrying options in a way that significantly impacts the performance of options. This article presents an experiment based on end-to-end probing using UDP packets, capturing the performance penalties associated with IPv4 options. Analysis of experiment results quantifies the impact of IPv4 options on forwarding performance in terms of delay, jitter and loss rate. From the analysis it can be concluded that there is a slight increase in delay and jitter and a severe increase in loss rate.