Towards a User-Oriented Benchmark for Transport Protocols Comparison in very High Speed Networks

Abstract

Standard TCP faces some performance limitations in very high speed wide area networks, mainly due to a long end-to-end feedback loop and a conservative behaviour with respect to congestion. Many TCP variants have been proposed to overcome these limitations. However, TCP is a complex protocol with many user-configurable parameters and a range of different implementations. It is then important to define measurement methods so that the transport services and protocols can evolve guided by scientific principles and compared quantitatively. The goal of this report is to present some steps towards a user-oriented benchmark, called ITB, for high speed transport protocols comparison. We first present and analyse some results reported in the literature. From this study we identify classes of representative applications and useful metrics. We then isolate infrastructure parameters and traffic factors which influence the protocol behaviour. This enable us to define scenario capturing and synthesising comprehensive and useful properties. We finally illustrate this proposal by preliminary results obtained on our experimental environment, Grid'5000, we have built and are using for contributing in this benchmark design