QoS experiences in native IPv6 networks

Deployment of IPv6 technology in research and commercial networks has accelerated in the last few years. Inevitably, as more advanced services take advantage of the new technology, IPv6 traffic gradually increases. Today, there is limited experience in the deployment of Quality of Service (QoS) for IPv6 traffic in backbone networks that support the Differentiated Services framework. As available software and hardware are designed to handle IPv4 packets, there is a need to accurately measure and validate performance of QoS mechanisms in an IPv6 environment. This paper discusses tests and technical challenges in the deployment of IPv6 QoS in core networks, namely the production dual stack gigabit-speed Greek Research and Education Network (GRNET) and the IPv6-only 6NET European test network, using both hardware and software platforms. In either case, we succeeded in delivering advanced transport services to IPv6 traffic and provided different performance guarantees to portions of traffic. The deployed QoS schema was common to IPv6 and IPv4; in most cases both v4 and v6 traffic exhibited comparable performance per class, while imposing no significantly different overhead on network elements. A major conclusion of our tests is that the IPv6 QoS mechanisms are efficiently supported with state-of-the-art router cards at gigabit speeds.