PFPG: A novel MTU model for IPv4/IPv6 transition

Transition techniques play a vital role during the evolvement process of the Internet from IPv4 to IPv6. However, packet length change during the forwarding process may result in fragmentation and reassembly of a large number of packets, which greatly impacts the forwarding performance. In addition, different Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) mechanisms of IPv4 and IPv6 have also brought lots of troubles to transition techniques. Existing researches only provided preliminary ideas instead of any specific implementation methods. To this aim, the Pre-Fragment Packet in Gateway (PFPG) model is presented, which can insure that reassembly does not occur during packet forwarding. As PFPG is only implemented at transition gateway and nothing is done in terminal systems and other routers, the model with less deployment points can be easily maintained. Experiments indicate that PFPG can achieve preferable forwarding performance.