Measurement and performance issues of transport protocols over 10Gbps high-speed optical networks

Abstract

With the integration of IP and optical technology, a high-speed optical network (of the order of 10Gbps) has emerged to support international research cooperation such as massive scientific data transfer and next generation Internet related research. Therefore, it is critical to explore the issues of measurement and evaluation on the performance of transport protocols over 10 Gbps high-speed optical networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that presents a measurement study on a variety of networking environments. The objectives of this paper are as follows: (i) determine the suitability of TCP parameters such as Jumbo Frame size, buffer sizes of a TCP sender and a receiver; (ii) evaluate TCP performance measurement tools and emulation tools over 10 Gbps high-speed optical networks; and (iii) compare performance of TCP variants with different metrics, such as throughput and fairness, by varying delays and randomized losses controlled with software emulators. The result shows that selection of emulation and performance measurement tools matters for the accurate measurement of TCP performance. The performance of TCP variants is highly impacted by the Linux TCP/IP stack tuning. Finally we present that overall and detailed performance, such as throughput and fairness, of each TCP variant is dependent on different network environments, such as packet loss rate and propagation delay.