Performance Comparison of ISATAP Implementations on FreeBSD, RedHat, and Windows 2003

The intra-site automatic tunnel addressing protocol (ISATAP) is one of the transition mechanisms used for gradually IPv6 migration. Since many ISATAP implementations exist, to answer which one is the most preferable, we experimentally deploy IPv6 testbeds and compare the performance of ISATAP implementations on three popular operating systems including Windows 2003, FreeBSD 5.3 with KAME IPv6 protocol stack, and RedHat 9.0 with USAGI IPv6 protocol stacks. We also compare the performance of IPv4, IPv6, and ISATAP protocols on these operating systems by using iperf program to generate both TCP and UDP traffic with different payload sizes and with different number of packets per second (pps). For each condition, we measure the maximum data throughput and also the maximum number of pps before a router begins dropping packets. Experimental results show that ISATAP implementation on RedHat 9.0 gains better performance than those on FreeBSD 5.3 and Windows 2003, respectively.