Performance Evaluation of a Multipurpose Bare PC Gateway

Internet usage keeps growing daily with global internet traffic
expected to quadruple by the end of 2015. This is as mainly
due to increasing number of devices connecting to the internet
and making data exchange much easier. This growth has
impacted the current Internet Protocol version 4 being used to
connect devices together. IPv4 addresses are running out
quickly, to resolve this problem the Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF) introduced Internet Protocol Version 6(IPv6) as a
solution. However the transition has being slow due to
incompatible devices, technical hurdles, and cost. Different
solutions (6to4 tunneling, IVI translation, NAT64, DNS64
etc.), have being proposed but these are all standalone
systems. In this paper we discuss the design,implementation
and performance evaluation of a multipurpose Bare PC
Gateway which incorporates Network Address translation
(NAT), 6to4 tunneling and IVI translation in a single “box”
using Bare Machine Computing Paradigm. Experimental
testing of the designed system shows our single point
integrated system performs well using various measurement
metrics as throughput, response time, connection time, jitter
etc. in a LAN environment. Our results indicate a relatively
better performance (18%-45%) of the Bare PC gateway
compared to a Linux gateway (running the functionalities as
standalone systems). We believe the proposed solution could
easily scale to wide area networks and also provide a cost
efficient solution