Comparative Study of a Router Performance with IPv4 and IPv6 Traffic

Abstract

Because of the growth of the number of devices that use the internet, the number of available IPv4 addresses has run out in most parts of the world. IPv6 was created to solve this problem but the migration progress is proceeding at a slower pace that it was expected. This is mostly due to the cost of changing the equipment to one that supports IPv6 and the cost of configuring these devices. Knowing the aspects of a router configuration that are affected by the performance of IPv6 is very important in order to improve the efficiency of IPv6 end facilitate the migration process. In this paper we perform several measures to detect which aspects of the configuration of a bottom and medium range router are affected by IPv6. Two different topologies were used and different combinations of IPv4 and IPv6 traffic are sent. In different test Access Control Lists or IPv6 Routing Extension Headers are used. CPU usage and maximum traffic rate are some evaluated parameters. The router performance is clearly affected by the IPv6 traffic is used, CPU usage increases and the maximum traffic rate decreases.