Security and performance analysis of the IPv6 transition methods

The Internet Protocol (IP) is designed for use in interconnected systems of packet-switched computer communication networks. It is the common language of the Internet which was defined and standardized in RFC 791 at 1981. Depending on explosive growth of the Internet, currently used IP version IPv4 (IP Version 4) is exhausting its address space. To remedy the foreseen address space limitation and to provide additional functionality, IETF started to work at the early 90?s and published the IPv6 standards in RFC 2460 at 1998.The migration to a new protocol will not be achieved overnight. Therefore, IPv4 and IPv6 will have to coexist for several years. The key to a successful IPv6 transition is compatibility and interoperability between IPv4 nodes and IPv6 nodes. For this purpose, many IPv6 transition mechanisms were developed.This study aims to provide a foresight about the IPv6 transition mechanisms according to their security and performance analysis. Depending on many research and real network tests, IPv6 transition mechanisms were evaluated from the small networks to the large networks in the view of the security, performance and applicability metrics. Furthermore, IPv6 transition mechanisms were evaluated against the denial of service attacks at the real network testbed which was didn?t analyzed yet. Also, a new mechanism was proposed to protect some of the IPv6 translator approaches against the single point of failure. This study organized as follows; First section presents the related work about the IPv6 transition mechanisms and second section presents the IPv6 header and addressing architecture. In the next sections, security and performance analysis of the IPv6 transition mechanisms were discussed. And last section dedicated to conclusions.