Vista and IPV6 's network performance challenges

One of the purposes of Microsoft's development of Windows Vista is to drive the development of IPV6. IPV6 is the next Generation Internet protocol designed to replace IPV4, the current standard network protocol. The IPV4 protocol has much in common with the original implementation of TCP/IP, which was proposed in 1974. Apparently, engineers in the early 1970 had no way of anticipating how the TCP/IP they used to develop today.

TCP/IP design does not actually take into account the fact that it will do so many things today, the protocol design is somewhat simple, can be said to be too simple. IPV6 is used to address these drawbacks, while also greatly expanding the number of available IP addresses.

The problem with IPV6 is that the IPV6 address is fundamentally different from the IPV4 address. Although technologies such as IPV6 address to IPv4 address translation allow IPV6 groupings to be transmitted over IPV4 networks, most countries are not ready for immediate switching from IPV4 to IPV6.

Microsoft wants people to switch to IPV6. However, for the time being, IPV4 is still essential in communicating with other parts of the world. Microsoft's solution is to build a two-protocol stack that allows IPV6 and IPv4 to run side-by-side, with both protocols starting at the same time by default.

For the most part, this is an effective solution. It enables companies to maintain backward compatibility with IPv4 while migrating to IPV6. The problem is that many network routers do not know how to handle IPv6 traffic properly. This is especially true for routers that rely on symmetric network address translation (NAT). The phenomenon of network failure caused by incompatibility is: Slow network connection speed, decreasing network performance, and the inability to use some new features of Vista.

In addition to a wide range of IPV6 compatibility issues, Windows Vista uses Plug and Play (Universal Plug, UPnP) protocol standards more often than Windows XP. There is no problem with the UPnP protocol standard itself. Exactly, Windows XP is using them all the time. The problem, however, is that Vista produces much more UPnP traffic than Windows XP, which can cause problems for some routers as they process these new traffic. The failure to properly handle these new traffic leads to a common problem with routers: page errors and reduced network performance while browsing the web. Sometimes, a network router may even stop working and need to reboot.

Conclusion

As you can see, any organization should first ensure that its routers can handle IPV6 traffic before using Windows Vista. IPV6 can be disabled in Windows Vista, but many of Vista's new features, such as the various Peer-to-peer networking features, will not work without IPv6. Fortunately, Microsoft has developed a tool for Internet connectivity Evaluation Tool, which allows you to determine if there is a problem with your router and Windows Vista. (It is to be stressed that the tool can only run on a home network after the Home Network (NAT) router and not in the network behind the corporate firewall.) )