An end-to-end header compression for multihop IPv6 tunnels with varying bandwidth

Abstract

With the exponential growth of internet it's impossible to sustain with IPv4 protocol due to its limited space capability and the only option is to move towards new next generation internet protocol IPv6. Different transition techniques have been proposed from the far to enable the smooth interoperation between the two protocols: Dual Stack, Tunneling, and Header Translation. Tunneling is the generally used solution to carry an IPv6 packet across the IPv4 network. Tunneling comes with several imperfections like inefficient routing, header overhead due to multiple headers present, Quality of service and high band width usage. These overheads could degrade the network performance especially over wireless links where there is scarcity of resources. In this paper we are addressing the header overhead issue in context of IPv6 tunnels, where the IPv6 header of 40 bytes is encapsulated inside an IPv4 header of length 20 bytes. This overhead would affect the network performance, especially over low bandwidth links, where resource is a constraint. So, it's better to compress this header and then send it over link and decompress it at the other end of the link. In this paper we have proposed a new approach to compress the IPv6 header of the packet, in context of IPv6 tunnels, which would improve the efficiency of IPv6 tunneling mechanism. Doing this we have compressed the 40 bytes of IPv6 header up to 6 bytes. We have applied this compression over multihop wired and wireless tunnels. Extensive amount of simulations are provided to compare the newly developed protocol with the standard tunneling technique. Results show that using this approach we are getting better network deliverables in terms of throughput, average end-to-end delay, Jitter, and Packet delivery ratio.