Evaluating IPv6 on Windows and Solaris

IPv6 might solve several of IPv4's shortcomings, but the longer headers and address space add overhead that affects a range of performance metrics for both TCP and UDP. We established a test bed to compare the two protocol stacks along a set of six performance metrics. We also compared two IPv6 implementations running on Windows 2000 and Solaris 8 using identical hardware and settings. We performed additional tests using different configurations, including a pair of commercial routers that support dual IPv4-IPv6 stacks. While the majority of those results are beyond this article's scope, some of our experiences with the routers raised points that we address here.