Performance Comparison of 6to4, 6RD, and ISATAP Tunnelling Methods on Real Testbeds

ᅳThe Internet address system is about to change into the IPv6 (128 bits) mode from the existing IPv4 (32 bits) mode, as class-based IPv4 addresses are recently being depleted. The transition of the Internet address system into IPv6 not only seems to be a solution to the problem of the lack of address space, but also seems to provide various advantages to Internet users, such as routing efficiency enhancement, security performance improvement, free mobility support, and QoS guarantee. However, replacing the entire IPv4 network, which is the existing Internet telecommunication network infrastructure, with IPv6 all at once will require an enormous amount of cost and time. Therefore, a transition mechanism allowing IPv4 and IPv6 to be used concurrently for a certain period is needed. Currently, the existing technologies for this transition mechanism can be divided into a dual-stack method, tunnelling method, and translation method. Out of these three transition technologies, the tunnelling method is the one in which an IPv6only host/network or a dual-stack host/network can deliver data packets to an IPv6-only host/network through an IPv4 network, which is the existing network infrastructure. The tunnelling method can be largely classified into 6to4, ISATAP, 6RD, Teredo, tunnel broker, and 6PE according to the difference in operation theory and scenario environments in which an individual method can be operated. In this study, telecommunication scenarios using the IPv6 address system exclusively and the 6to4, ISATAP, and 6RD methods were designed for a transition from IPv4 to IPv6, and the data delivery efficiency for each case was measured and analyzed for both UDP and TCP on Linux-based testbeds. The results of this study showed that the 6RD tunnelling method exhibited the highest efficiency for both UDP and TCP.