Comparison of end-system IPv6 protocol stacks

The Internet Protocol version 6 (also known as IPv6) has been developed to replace the current IPv4 protocol. Various operating systems running at end-systems now support IPv6 protocol stacks and network infrastructures (hosts, routers) are currently being deployed to support IPv6 features. IPv6 stacks on end-systems constitute an important component in the migration and adoption of IPv6. To investigate the impact of IPv6 on user applications, an empirical evaluation was conducted on the performance of IPv4 and IPv6 protocol stacks on the Linux operating system for TCP and UDP protocols. The IPv6 performance obtained on Linux was compared with the performance of IPv6 of other commodity operating systems, namely Solaris 8 and Windows 2000. The experimental results demonstrate that the IPv6 protocol stack for Linux outperforms IPv6 stacks of these operating systems.