An Empirical Study of IPV6 Multicast Routing over a Virtual Local Area Network

The Internet Protocol Version 6 was designed to efficiently improve on the existing functionalities of Internet Protocol Version 4 and to introduce new constructs that it lacks. Though IPv6 is not an extension of IPv4, as the two protocols have different specifications. Both the new and the formal protocol use multicast routing for many of their operations; this implies multicast routing is core in the protocols. This experiment became imperative especially in this era everyone is looking forward to using IPv6 as the default network. This paper tested the performance of IPv6 multicast routing over a virtual local area network. Graphical Network Simulator 3 was used to configure the network and Microsoft Hyper-V was used as the hypervisor on which the six virtual machines (hosts) reside. Parameters such as throughput, latency variations, data loss and the network over heads were examined. The experiment has shown that, IPv6 multicast routing over a virtual network has 100% throughput, the jitter (variations in latency) varies among the hosts in all the running scenarios, but low and stabled jitters were noticed as the running duration increases and the number of streaming increase from one multicast stream to running two multicast streams simultaneously. There was no data loss.