While IPv6 deployment in the Internet continues to grow slowly at present, the imminent exhaustion of IPv4 addresses will encourage its increased use over the next several years. However, due to the predominance of IPv4 in the Internet, the transition to IPv6 is likely to take a long time. During the transition period, translation mechanisms will enable IPv6 hosts and IPv4 hosts to communicate with each other. For example, translation can be used when a server or application works with IPv4 but not with IPv6, and the effort or cost to modify the code is large. Stateless and stateful translation is the subject of several recent IETF RFCs. We evaluate performance of the new IVI translator, which is viewed as a design for stateless translation by conducting experiments in both LAN and Internet environments using a freely available Linux implementation of IVI. To study the impact of operating system overhead on IVI translation, we implemented the IVI translator on a bare PC that runs applications without an operating system or kernel. Our results based on internal timings in each system show that translating IPv4 packets into IPv6 packets is more expensive than the reverse, and that address mapping is the most expensive IVI operation. We also measured packets per second in the LAN, roundtrip times in the LAN and Internet, IVI overhead for various prefix sizes, TCP connection time, and the delay and throughput over the Internet for various files sizes. While both the Linux and bare PC implementations of IVI have low overhead, a modest performance gain is obtained due to using a bare PC. 1
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