Performance Evaluation of SIPv6 Transitioning

Due to the continuous massive growth of the global Internet, available IPv4 network addresses will run out within the next years. The solution to this problem is the IPv6 protocol with its vast address space. During the transition period from IPv4 to IPv6, both protocols will coexist, which makes it necessary to have transition techniques in place to maintain interoperability. These transition techniques have an inevitable impact on network performance. To quantify this impact, we set up a testbed to measure the performance penalties introduced by four transition techniques. In general, measurements of the transition performance can be carried out on different layers. The decision to pick the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as application layer protocol is based on the fact that Voice over IP may be one of the major drivers for IPv6. This paper presents measurement results and conclusions for transition and native scenarios that we gained in performance studies.