Home // International Journal On Advances in Networks and Services, volume 3, numbers 3 and 4, 2010 // View article

IMS-centric Evaluation of IPv4/IPv6 Transition Methods in 3G UMTS Systems

Authors:
László Bokor
Zoltán Kanizsai
Gábor Jeney

Keywords: IPv4, IPv6, L2TP, OpenVPN, 6to4, ISATAP, Teredo, NAT-PT, IMS, all-IP, 3G UMTS, performance evaluation, real-life testbed, measurements

Abstract:
The Internet Protocol is facing version change nowadays, IPv4 (the old version of IP) will be replaced by IPv6 (the new version of IP) in the near future. This transition strongly affects also wireless and mobile architectures due to widespread application of IP-based mobile networking architectures, the continuously increasing number of mobile Internet users, and the emerging convergence of different communication services driven by the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). However both IPv6 and IMS are deeply covered in the existing literature as self-possessed researches, the challenge of provisioning IPv6-based IMS services over 3rd Generation (3G) Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) networks as well as related problems and performance issues were not considered so far. In this work, we try to fill this gap and raise attention on the current questions and challenges of the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 in all-IP 3G and beyond multimedia systems. We analyze eight state of the art methods providing IPv6 support in existing mobile telecommunication architectures and evaluate their impacts on the network and service/application performance. In order to achieve this, we designed and implemented a real-life 3G UMTS-IMS testbed, and compared the characteristics of the selected transition techniques with native IPv6 and IPv4 scenarios from an IMS-centric point of view. Our results expose the main benefits and drawbacks of the evaluated technologies and their actually available implementations.

Pages: 402 to 416

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2010. Used with permission.

Publication date: April 6, 2011

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2644