Impacts of IPv6 on Robust Header Compression in LTE Mobile Networks

LTE is an all-IP based 3GPP architecture, meaning that the transport in the network is based on IP, a s post- Release 5 UMTS, unlike the former 3GPP architectures like GSM, Release 5 UMTS whose transport is based on ATM. Hence, fore-runners in this field have deployed wit h IPv4 as the basic protocol for addressing and transport, al though the deployment of LTE is still in its initial phase and trial runs are executed by various operators. But findings and res ults prove that the exhaustion of IPv4 will not make it possib le anymore IPv4 addresses for this new technology to take its full fledge. Hence, this led to the necessity of considering IPv 6 as the protocol for addressing and transport. The primary reason to perceive IPv6 is its scalability feature meaning th at it supports large address spacing. Now, with this in mind, when IPv6 is considered in the LTE architecture, the possible impacts on the network are investigated in depth in this paper. Th is is began by considering IPv6 in transport and application le vel in the different network entities in the LTE architecture like e-Node B, Serving-GW, PDN-GW and the transition impacts from IPv4 to IPv6 is analyzed. Based on preliminary empi rical evaluation, our conclusion is that despite the fact that IPv6 offers large address spacing, the fact that the siz e of the IPv6 header is 20 bytes more than the header of IPv4, le ads to complications as well.