Peak Performance of TCP and UDP in IPv4 and IPv6 over Ethernet Networks

IPv4 addresses have been depleted in February 2011, when the IANA allocated the remaining last five /8s IPv4 address blocks to the RIRs. IPv6 has been developed by the IETF as a solution to the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses. In this paper, we present some models to evaluate the performance of IPv4 and IPv6 in Ethernet networks, the most widely-installed local area network technology. Our models can be used for any variant of Ethernet technologies (10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, or 1000 Mbps). We introduce a lower-bound model for the one-way delay and an upper-bound model for the throughput, in both IPv4 and IPv6. We validate our models with experiments and simulations. From our research, we can conclude that IPv4 has a better performance than IPv6, but the differences are small and should not delay the migration from IPv4 to IPv6.