Abstract

IPv6 addressing is taking over from IPv4 with the exhaustion of the latter’s address space. However, both versions of IP are incompatible hence the need for transition technologies to ensure their coexistence. This research analyzed the performance of the 6to4 transition mechanism when it ran over two separate WAN technologies namely MPLS and Frame Relay by way of simulating the scenarios using OPNET 14.5. Traffic generated for this analysis were from FTP, Email and Database query, and were used to measure and analyze performance metrics such as end-to-end delay, response time and point to point link utilization over an hour of simulation time to ascertain which WAN and transition mechanism provided the best performance. The simulation values at the end of the research indicated that 6to4 together with MPLS produced lower values for all the performance metrics studied.

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