Implementing QoS capabilities in IPv6 networks and comparison with MPLS and RSVP

Abstract

With the growth of the Internet and Intranets, and the use of multimedia applications, video and audio streams, QoS (Quality of Service) technology has become more relevant and important. The next generation Internet Protocol (IPv6) provides more features than IPv4 such as more address space and new fields that can be used to enhance and make the usage of IP networks more frequent even with sensitive traffic flows. Current IP networks provide best effort traffic delivery since no QoS features were implemented so other protocols are used to guarantee requests for sensitive traffic flows. IPv6 has implemented two fields that can be used as tools to implement QoS, the two fields are, Flow label and Traffic class. Flow label is a 20 bit field used by a source to label sequences of packets for which it requests special handling by IPv6 routers. Traffic class is used to indicate the priority level of the traffic flow. IPv6 routers will look at the flow label field plus source address to process the flow packets. In this paper, we will investigate IPv6 based end-to-end QoS methodology on Quality of Service parameters such as end-to-end delay, packet loss and throughput delay using simulations performed with Network Simulator (NS). The results obtained will be compared with two traditional end-to-end Quality of Service methods, viz., MPLS (Multi Protocol Label Switching) and RSVP (Resource Reservation Protocol).