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Re: Routing with IPv6



Nicolas Ruiz wrote:
> Pepo wrote:
>> In some paper Ive read that IPv6 have better performance in routing than IPv4, 
>> but I dont know why.
> 
>> Please, can you tell me why is better/fast IPv6 for routing than IPv4?
> 
> Routing with IPv6 and IPv4 are done esentially in the same way. The
> "better performance" part of IPv6 routing comes from the way the IPv6
> header is built: it has a fixed size and (with few exceptions) an
> intermediate router does not need to look at the packet options.

It does have a fixed size, but so does IPv4. IPv6 has the concept of
'next header', and routers do have to check these as there might be
Hop-By-Hop option headers in there. As such this is exactly the same as
IPv4, except written down in a different way.

The *real* speed increase is gained from the mere fact that IPv6 headers
 don't have any checksum. Routers decrement the IPv4 TTL/IPv6 HopCount.
In IPv4 this means the checksum has to be recalculated, as there is no
such checksum in IPv6, the router simply decrements and forwards the
packet. This saves a few cycles of processing.

Next to that core routers can be optimized to route on /48 boundaries,
delegating longer prefixes to a secondary lookups. This all makes it
much more efficient to forward a packet.

Greets,
 Jeroen


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