IP Overhead Comparison in a Test-Bed for Air Traffic Management Services

This paper presents the comparison of two IPv6 over IPv4 solutions for a laboratory demonstrator within NEWSKY, a project co-funded by the European Commission within its 6th Research Framework Programme (FP6). NEWSKY aims at developing a concept for a global, heterogeneous communication network for aeronautical communications. It assumes IPv6 hosts, but nowadays satellite networks still run over IPv4 links. Two solutions have been tested and investigated over a real satellite link for this project: L2TP tunneling and NAPT-PT modified. Both are implemented and compared in terms of overhead and complexity. Results show that NAPT-PT modified adds less overhead than tunneling, however, L2TP computation is easier and faster than NAPT-PT modified.