Formulating and Evaluating Impacts of IPv6 Header Overhead for Videos over Wireless Networks

Abstract

IPv6 is designed to satisfy the dramatically growing number of users and multimedia applications in the current and next generation networks. Using the WLAN technology can effectively extend the IPv6 world from wired to wireless infrastructures. Although IPv6 protocol belongs to the Network Layer, the header increase of IPv6 may affect the effective throughput of WLAN and the video coding work. This paper formulates a simply yet robust closed-form for finding an IPv6 packet size that can maximize the WLAN throughput based on the header overhead of IPv6 packets, the wireless channel condition with burst bit errors, and the finite retransmission number of ARQ (Automatic Repeat Request). The formulated closed-form can: 1) accurately and timely determine the most suitable IPv6 packet size according to the current wireless channel status; 2) effectively quantify the WLAN throughput degradation due to the header increase of IPv6. This study also explores the impact of header overhead of IPv6 packets to the video coding work and proposes a Header Overhead Accommodation (HOA) scheme to solve the problem. Analytical and simulation results verify the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed closed-form and HOA methods. The contributions are robust for various IPv6 implementations such as the IPSec (IP Security) over different 802.11 standards.