Experimental Evaluation of SUNOS IPC and TCP/IP Protocol Implementations
Abstract
Progress in the field of high speed networking and distributed applications has led to the debate in the research community on suitability of existing protocols such as TCP/IP for emerging applications over high speed networks. Protocols have to operate in a complex environment comprising of various operating systems, host architectures, and a rapidly growing and evolving internet of large number of heterogeneous subnetworks. Thus, evaluation of protocols is definitely a challenging task and cannot be achieved by studying protocols in isolation. This paper presents results of a research project that was undertaken with the following objectives: 1) Characterization of the performance of TCP?IP protocols for communication intensive applications. Components to be studied include control mechanisms (such as flow and error control), per-packet processing, buffer requirements, and interaction with the operating system, by systematic measurement and extrapolation. 2) An attempt to investigate the scalability of existing protocols to future networks and applications.