Simulation of IPv4-to-IPv6 Dual Stack Transition Mechanism (DSTM) between IPv4 hosts in integrated IPv6/IPv4 network

IPv6 offers variety of enhancements including increased addressing capacity, Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning, built in security through IPSec and improved routing efficiency, over IPv4. But moving from the current version of IPv4 to the future version of IPv6 is not a straightforward process due to their incompatibility and will consume significant amount of time. So for the coming years both the protocols need to coexist. For the smooth interoperation of the two protocols, various well defined transition mechanisms have been proposed so far. In this paper a comparative study of the behavior of IPv4-only network with that of Dual Stack Transition Mechanism (DSTM) under various types of traffic patterns is carried out. In the proposed DSTM enabled network architecture, the hosts in IPv4 network initiates connection with hosts in the IPv4 network over an integrated IPv4/IPv6 network. The performance metric considered in this work is mean end-to-end delay for both the scenarios. Assessment of the mean end-to-end delay is performed on various applications like Real Audio (RA) and CBR over UDP and FTP over TCP. All the simulations are performed using Network Simulator 2 (ns-2).