Impact of IPv6 on end-user applications

With IPv6's maturity increasing, there is a need to evaluate the performance benefits or drawbacks for end-users that the new IPv6 protocol will have compared to the well-established IPv4 protocol. Theoretically, the expected overhead between the two different protocols should be directly proportional to the difference in the packet's header size, and therefore the expected performance of IPv6 should be similar to IPv4. However, according to our findings, the empirical performance difference between IPv4 and IPv6 in a real setting is much higher than anticipated. Our experimental setup is the key ingredient to our findings since it demonstrates the current performance of IPv6 as delivered by commercial routers supporting IPv6 for performance metrics such as throughput and latency. We hope that our experience and results will be useful to end users who are planning migration to IPv6 as well as designers and implementers of IPv6 (router and host implementations).