Evaluating an IPv4 and IPv6 Network

Abstract: This thesis is the result of the bachelor’s thesis project “Evaluating an IPv4 and IPv6 network”. The IPv6 protocol was created with the main purpose of solving the problem of the depletion of IPaddresses that IPv4 is currently facing. This thesis gives an introduction to the differences between IPv4 and IPv6 and when one should use one protocol rather than the other. It describes the services that we will use in order to evaluate what kinds of problems IPv4 may experience and if these problems can be solved by using IPv6. We also show how to set up a network with both protocols for each service that we examine. We will subsequently evaluate the performance of these two protocols for each of these services. We found that there were no significant differences in the performance of any of the applications that we tested with both IPv4 and IPv6. Due to the depletion of IPv4 addresses and the continuing rapid growth of the Internet, this thesis describes a very current and a relevant issue for computer networks today.