Benchmarking the load scalability of IPv6 transition technologies: A black-box analysis

The transition period which should have brought the end of the IPv4 era has no clear end in sight. With about 3% worldwide deployment rate, IPv6 still looks like a promise and the IPv6 transition like an ongoing struggle. Among the many challenges introduced by this transition process to the Internet community, one of the most difficult is to ensure a scalable network design when using IPv6 transition mechanisms. To that end, this article proposes a black-box approach for benchmarking the load scalability of IPv6 transition technologies. The tentative scalability metric quantifies the performance degradation of well-established metrics such as round-trip delay, jitter, throughput and packet loss. As a study case, empirical data for two open-source IPv6 transition implementations is presented.