Analytical Performance Evaluation of IPv6 and IPv4 Over 10 Gigabit Ethernet and InfiniBand using IPoIB

Abstract

Abstract-IPv6 is the response to the shortage of IPv4 addresses. It was defined almost twenty years ago by the IETF as a replacement of IPv4, and little by little, it is becoming more preponderant as the Internet protocol. The growth of Internet has led to the development of high performance networks. On one hand, Ethernet has evolved significantly and today it is common to find 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks in LANs. On the other hand, another approach for high performance networking is based on RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) which offers innovative features such as kernel bypass, zero copy, offload of splitting and assembly of messages in packets to the CAs (Channel Adapters), etc. InfiniBand is currently the most popular technology that implements RDMA. It uses verbs instead of sockets and a big effort of the community is required to port TCP/IP software to InfiniBand, to take advantage of its benefits. Meanwhile, IPoIB (IP over InfiniBand) is a protocol that has been proposed and permits the execution of socket-based applications on top of InfiniBand, without any change, at the expense of performance. In this paper, we make a performance evaluation of IPv6 and IPv4 over 10 Gigabit Ethernet and IPoIB. Our results show that 10 Gigabit Ethernet has a better throughput than IPoIB, especially for small and medium payload sizes. However, as the payload size increases, the advantage of 10 Gigabit Ethernet is reduced in comparison to IPoIB/FDR. With respect to latency, IPoIB did much better than 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Finally, our research also indicates that in a controlled environment, IPv4 has a better performance than IPv6.

Performance comparison of transmitting jumbo frame on Windows and Linux System

“…IPv6 has a very large address spaces that is up to 128 bit [1]. The larger address space of IPv6 allows network to be extended for connecting every equipment which later is called as IoT (Internet of Things) [2,3]. The IPv6 supports to send a large packet size up to 65 kB as indicated by the 16 bits next header field.…”

“…Eric Gamess and Rina Suros [3] conducted a research by using an upper-bound model for measuring throughput of network protocol IPv4 and IPv6 on transmission protocol TCP and UDP. The models were established by all varieties of Ethernet (10, 100, and 1000 Mbps).…”