Enhancing the Efficiency of Multihop IPV6 Tunnels Using Header Compression over Varying Packet Sizes

IPv6 is the next generation Internet protocol which will eventually replace IPv4, but until this happens these two protocols need to coexist for a long time. IPv6 offers several benefits over IPv4, still the adoption rate is very low over worldwide. In all the widely used applications such as email, messaging services, file transfer, web, audio streams, video on demand etc, the IP traffic is common and generates the highest overhead with IPv6 and IPv4 headers of size 40 and 20 bytes, respectively. This overhead could be even more in case of tunnel where one packet is encapsulated inside another packet. This high header overhead could degrade the performance of network especially over wireless links where resources are scarce. Header Compression (HC) results in improved network performance and better utilisation of resources. In this paper we are improving the efficiency of IPv6 tunnels by compressing the IPv6 header of the packet. Here tunnel is a multihop tunnel between edge routers. Performance of HC is checked over two different network conditions: Wireless and Wired Networks. Simulations are carried out over Qualnet 5.1 simulator, different performance parameter like throughput, delay, jitter and packet delivery ratio is been calculated over different packet sizes.