Performance Comparison Between Different Tunneling Techniques Using Different Routing Protocols

Migration to IPv6 becomes a priority with the draining of IPv4 addresses. But both IPv4 and IPv6 have different structures, and directly bringing IPv6 into the current IPv4 network does not work due to their compatibility issues. Therefore, Dual-Stack, Tunneling, and Protocol Translator mechanisms are adopted to smooth the transition between IPv4 and IPv6 networks. The transitions allow us to communicate between both IPv4 and IPv6 networks together despite having their different structures. The proper transition mechanism has to be adopted for a complex network, and the in-depth study and analysis can help find the best transition technique. In this paper, the 6to4 tunneling is configured for a real-time network using real-time applications- FTP and Email, and the performance of the transition between IPv4 and IPv6 addressing networks is evaluated. For analysis, the automatic and manual 6to4 tunneling is configured simultaneously with Routing Information Protocol/Routing Information Protocol next generation and Open Shortest Path First/Open Shortest Path First version 3 routing protocols. The networks are configured and simulated on the Riverbed Modeler Academic Edition 17.5. These cases are analyzed and compared for global performance parameters as traffic dropped, network convergence duration, and traffic sent. The object performance parameters for point-to-point connections are analyzed as queuing delay and throughput for incoming and outgoing traffic. This novel work is helpful for researchers as it gives a detailed study to choose the appropriate tunneling technique with a mixture of proper routing protocols for efficient performance.