A Test Lab for the Performance Analysis of TCP Over Ethernet LAN on Windows Operating System

A test laboratory for the performance analysis of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the teaching of its basic concepts is proposed. The laboratory environment is a small Ethernet local area network (LAN) with PCs running different versions of the Windows operating system (95/98/NT/2000). To support the Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) for Windows and to improve flexibility, the Netperf TCP software tool has been modified. Based on the modified Netperf and a protocol analyzer, students perform traffic measurements on a real network. Various aspects of the Microsoft TCP implementation for Windows are discovered and clearly explained. The IPv6 for Windows 2000 is also examined, and comparisons with IPv4 are made.