Performance analysis of a LAN based remote terminal protocol

The author designs and analyzes the performance of a remote terminal protocol (RTP), called TAP, for use as a terminal access protocol in a 4BSD UNIX environment. He characterizes the workload by tracing user terminal activity on a multiuser timeshare machine. The trace analysis shows that user terminal traffic is bursty, with 99% of the traffic from the terminal being one byte long. The trace results are then used in the design of the TAP protocol and in the construction of a terminal workload under UNIX. The TAP protocol multiplexes individual terminal users onto a common LAN packet. Such a protocol imposes much less overhead on the host machine than existing protocols. Finally, the author makes a performance comparison of TAP and conventional RTPs under the constructed workload using a queuing model. He finds that TAP outperforms the other three protocols tested, due to the reduced number of packets