Dynamic MTU for Reducing the Packet Drop in IPv6 Protocol
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With an increase in the number of internet users and the need to secure internet traffic, the unreliable IPv4 protocol has been replaced by a more secure protocol, called IPv6. The IPv6 protocol does not allow intermediate routers to fragment the on-going IPv6 packet. Moreover, due to IP tunneling, some extra headers are added to the IPv6 packet, exceeding the packet size higher than the maximum transmission unit (MTU), resulting in increase in packet drops. One probable solution is to find the MTU of every link in advance using the ICMP packets and accordingly fragment the packets at the source itself. However, most of the intermediate routers and the network firewalls do not allow ICMP packets to traverse through their network, resulting in network black holes, where we cannot know the MTU of some links in advance. This paper tries to handle the packet drops inside the network by proposing a DMTU scheme where we dynamically adjust the MTU of each link depending upon the original size of the IPv6 packet, thereby reducing the number of packet drops by a significant amount. Using mathematical and graphical analysis, our scheme proves to be much more efficient than the state-of-the-art PMTUD scheme.
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