Performance Analysis of Various High Speed Data Transfer Protocols for Streaming Data in Long Fat Networks

In recent years high performance computing has evolved from large and expensive supercomputers to network based environments or workstation clusters and to grid computing. A grid is composed by geographically sparse resources that join to form a virtual computer. The resources (computers, networks, storage devices, etc.) of the grid are heterogeneous and reside in differentiated domains. An important aspect in most applications that execute in grid systems is that they handle great volumes of data and transfer large amounts of data over long distance networks. The throughput of in use protocols is much smaller than the application requirements. High speed protocols are being developed to overcome this problem, such kinds of protocols are GridFTP, GridCopy and UDT. Multimedia data distribution is one of the most important network applications, both on the global internet and in intranets. Several universities are already deploying or experimenting solutions for multimedia data distribution over their TCP/IP wired/wireless networks and the internet. Such data movements is not a productive activity, so the time spent for transfer on it should be minimized. In this paper we analyze the performance of the three protocols, GridFTP, GridCopy and UDT for multimedia data. The following parameters are used for analyzing the protocols: i)transfer rate, ii) file size, iii) throughput, iv) fairness, v) cpu usage and vi) security.