Performance Analysis of Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) and Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) over MPLS

Abstract

Exhaustion of the address space of current version of Internet Protocol (IPv4) actuated the development of next-generation Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). Even though the deployment of IPv6 has not progressed as per the predictions given by the technologists, primarily the reason being lack of awareness about IPv6 as well as the technical immaturity of people about the same as compared to IPv4. Now for IPv4 and IPv6 to coexist, various IPv6 transition mechanisms have been developed, in addition to that Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a switching technology that regulates data traffic and packet forwarding in a complex network to make data forwarding decisions. The various applications of MPLS are VPN’S (Virtual Private Network), TE (Traffic Engineering), QoS (Quality of Service), AToM (any transport over MPLS). Nowadays keeping in view the explosive growth of Internet Traffic, primarily the cause being high definition audio/video, and multicast routing protocols are run over unicast routing protocols to provide efficient routing of such applications. This unicasting and multicasting has been proven to be efficient with minimum delay than the traditional IPv4 and IPv6 networks. In this paper, we compare the MPLS enabled networks with the traditional networks (IPv4/IPv6) for unicast and multicast traffic, and also the routing protocol comparison is shown by employing different routing protocols like RIP, OSPF, IGRP and EIGRP over the MPLS network. Simulation environment was created to evaluate the comparative performance of network traffic behavior. The results of the simulation conclude that MPLS enabled networks perform better than the traditional networks with lesser Jitter, lesser delay and better throughput.