QoS experiences in native IPv6 networks

Abstract

SUMMARYDeployment of IPv6 technology in research and commercial networks has accelerated in the last few years. Inevitably, as more advanced services take advantage of the new technology, IPv6 traffi c gradually increases. Today, there is limited experience in the deployment of Quality of Service (QoS) for IPv6 traffi c in backbone networks that support the Differentiated Services framework. As available software and hardware are designed to handle IPv4 packets, there is a need to accurately measure and validate performance of QoS mechanisms in an IPv6 environment. This paper discusses tests and technical challenges in the deployment of IPv6 QoS in core networks, namely the production dual stack gigabit-speed Greek Research and Education Network (GRNET) and the IPv6-only 6NET European test network, using both hardware and software platforms. In either case, we succeeded in delivering advanced transport services to IPv6 traffi c and provided different performance guarantees to portions of traffi c. The deployed QoS schema was common to IPv6 and IPv4; in most cases both v4 and v6 traffi c exhibited comparable performance per class, while imposing no signifi cantly different overhead on network elements. A major conclusion of our tests is that the IPv6 QoS mechanisms are effi ciently supported with state-of-the-art router cards at gigabit speeds.

Evaluation of IPv6 transition mechanisms using QoS service policies

“…Previous work has investigated QoS performance of native IPv6 connectivity when utilizing Diffserv architecture in a test network [5]. This work concluded that IPv4 and IPv6 performance guarantees were identical when implemented in Cisco gigabit Ethernet routers but older line cards showed IPv6 performance was worse.…”

“…The last noticeable gap is the lack of studies utilizing real hardware devices, with the notable exception of [5]. The majority of studies utilize modelling and simulation tools for simplified deployment.…”

“…The study described here aimed to fill those gaps providing an overview of performance during congestion with established QoS schemes in place. It addresses the recommendations of [5] as it uses Cisco ISR 4351 routers which are the currently recommended router platforms for branch offices [10]. These routers include faster IPv6 switching and were configured to apply the currently recommended traffic class service policies including CS6 for Network Control traffic [11].…”

Survey of Header Compression Techniques over Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS)

“…In addition to this, introduction of flow label field was further major change in IPv4 header for QoS purpose [9]. In addition to huge address space, IPv6 puts forward an important enhancement with respect to built-in security, mobility, auto-configuration and enhanced multicast support [10].…”

Effect Of Packet Delay Variation On Video/Voice Over Diffserv-Mpls In Ipv4/Ipv6 Networks

“…Therefore, in order to strengthen the existing architecture of Internet Protocol, IETF has developed Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) [1]. IPv6 offers a significant improvement over IPv4 when it comes to the unlimited address space, the built-in mobility and the security support, easy configuration of end systems, and enhanced multicast features, etc [2]. On the other hand, due to the fascination of end users of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the popularity of real-time applications, we can now observe new increasing demands on real-time multimedia services over the Internet.…”