Enhancing the Efficiency of IPv6 Tunnelling Mechanism by using Header Compression over IPv6 Header

Abstract: Internet is growing at a tremendous rate and with this rate of growth it's not possible to sustain with the IPv4 and therefore the solely alternative is to adopt IPv6, the new internet protocol. Despite of numerous advantages that IPv6 offers over IPv4 the adoption rate of IPv6 by the users and is very slow. The main overhead involved with IPv6 protocol is header overhead of 40 bytes, and this overhead is even more when we are using tunneling mechanism, where one header is encapsulated inside the other. This overhead may have an effect on the performance particularly over wireless links where resources are scarce. In this paper we want to improve the efficiency of tunneling mechanism over IPv6 networks by using Header Compression technique. Here we are compressing the IPv6 Header of the packet as IPv6 header is of largest length and the results are analyzed on the basis of different packet sizes, different parameters like throughput, jitter, end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio are calculated. These results are the compared with uncompressed network. Simulations are carried out over Qualnet 5.1 Simulator. These results show that the using header compression over IPv6 tunneling mechanism performing better than uncompressed network.

Keywords: Context id, Header Compression, Header Decompression, IPv4, IPv6, Profile id, Tunneling.