Evaluating IPv6 on a large-scale network Wen-Lung Shiau a, * , Yu-Feng Li b , Han-Chieh Chao c , Ping-Yu Hsu d a Department of Information Management, Ming Chuan University, No. 5, Teh-Ming Rd., Gwei-Shan District, Taoyuan, County 333, Taiwan, R.O.C b Computer & IT Center at National Dong Hwa University, Hualien, Taiwan, R.O.C c Department of Electrical Engineering, National Dong Hwa University, Hualien, Taiwan, R.O.C d Department of Business Administration, National Central University, Chung-Li, Taiwan, R.O.C Available online 9 January 2006 Abstract We evaluate an ideal model and a real large-scale network environment using available end-to-end measurement techniques that focuses on a large-scale IPv6 backbone and made performance comparisons between the current Internet (IPv4) and next generation Internet (IPv6). In this paper, we compiled the performance statistics of each network in terms of TCP and UDP throughput, delay jitters, packet loss rate, and round trip time. Our conclusions show that, in a real large-scale network environment, a minor degradation in the throughput of the TCP, a slightly higher throughput of the UDP, a somewhat emerging frequency of the delay jitter, a lower packet loss rate, and a slightly longer round trip time happens when we compare the IPv6 network to the IPv4 network. Ó 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: IPv4; IPv6; Performance measurement; End-to-end performance 1. Introduction More and more enterprise clients replace their mission- critical applications on the Internet in favor of cheaper and more ubiquitous Internet networks. For these applica- tions, business enterprises are evaluating Internet networks by their ability to meet much more rigorous standards of availability and performance [18]. Today network back- bones offering bandwidths in excess of 1000 Mbps with very low transmission error rates are becoming widespread. The capacities of IP backbones are growing quickly to meet customer requirements [18]. But sometimes users still have to wait for information longer than the desired time and endure unsatisfactory performance. Performance is a key factor in the development and implementation of modern computer systems and networks [3]. From general users to advanced researchers, each user seeks minimum service time. Since service time is composed of: (a) local hardware sending requests, (b) network trans- mitting time, and (c) remote hardware receiving requests, end-to-end performance evaluation becomes a very crucial part in network assessment. In order to understand the Internet performance of users, more and more researchers evaluate end-to-end per- formance from different viewpoints. Krishnamurthy and Wills [1] analyzed factors that influence end-to-end mea- surement of Web performance. They examined the compo- nents of delay or the effectiveness of the recent changes on the HTTP protocol. They found pipelining as an improve- ment over existing practice, but concluded that servers serving a small number of objects or closing a persistent connection without explicit notification can decrease or eliminate any performance improvement. ElAarag and Bassiouni [4] measured end-to-end performance of TCP connections in an ideal and non-ideal network environ- ment. In their ideal model, they provided an upper bound limit for the throughput and a lower bound limit for the transfer time of the TCP connection. For the non-ideal environment, the simulation results show the relative per- formance of four standard TCP implementations. Ferrari [16] measured end-to-end performance analysis with traffic aggregation. The effect aggregation is fundamental in evaluating the capability of a diffserv network to preserve 0140-3664/$ - see front matter Ó 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2005.11.011 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +886 3 350 7001; fax: +886 3 359 3875. E-mail address: mac@mcu.edu.tw (W.-L. Shiau). www.elsevier.com/locate/comcom Computer Communications 29 (2006) 3113–3121