Performance evaluation of IPv4/IPv6 transition mechanisms for real-time applications using OPNET Modeler

Abstract

The problem of the potential depletion of IPv4 addresses has given rise to the development of a new version of the Internet Protocol named IPv6. This version of the protocol offers many improvements, including an increase in the address space from 232 to 2128 and improvements in security, mobility, and quality of service. However, the transition from the current version to the new version (IPv4 to IPv6) is complicated and cannot be performed in a short time. The size and complexity of Internet make this migration task extremely difficult and time-consuming. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) took into account this migration problem and proposed transition mechanisms as temporary solutions allowing IPv4 to coexist and operate in parallel with IPv6 networks. The dual stack, manual tunnel, and 6to4 automatic tunnel appear to be promising solutions depending on their characteristics and benefits. In this paper, we study the performance of these transition mechanisms on real-time applications (VoIP and Video Conferencing) using the network simulator OPNET Modeler. Performance parameters such as delay, delay variation, jitter, MOS, and packet loss are measured for these transition mechanisms. The obtained results showed that the dual stack transition mechanism gave better network performance than the tunneling mechanisms.