Diagnosing a TCP/ATM performance problem: a case study

Author

Van Melle, Reid ; Williamson, Carey ; Harrison, Tim

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., Saskatchewan Univ., Saskatoon, Sask., Canada

Volume

3

fYear

1997

fDate

3-8 Nov 1997

Firstpage

1825

Abstract

This paper describes our efforts in analyzing a TCP/ATM performance problem, wherein two SGI Indy workstations with OC-3 (155 Mbps) connectivity to a wide-area ATM network achieve a disappointing end-to-end throughput of 4.3 Mbps for file transfers. The problem is diagnosed using cell-level measurements from the operational ATM network. Surprisingly, the performance problems are not due to send and receive socket buffer size problems, heterogenous ATM equipment, or cell loss within the ATM network. Rather, the poor performance is caused by an overrun problem at the sending workstation for the ftp transfer, and TCP´s lack of robustness in the presence of multiple lost packets

Keywords

asynchronous transfer mode; transport protocols; wide area networks; 155 Mbit/s; 4.3 Mbit/s; ATM performance problem; OC-3 connectivity; SGI Indy workstations; TCP; cell-level measurements; end-to-end throughput; file transfers; ftp transfer; lost packets; overrun problem; sending workstation; wide-area ATM network; Asynchronous transfer mode; Computer aided software engineering; Performance analysis; Performance loss; Robustness; Sockets; Spine; Switches; Testing; Throughput; Workstations;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Global Telecommunications Conference, 1997. GLOBECOM '97., IEEE

Conference_Location

Phoenix, AZ

Print_ISBN

0-7803-4198-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/GLOCOM.1997.644585

Filename

644585