Long-Haul Transmission Performance in the Internet

Long-haul traffic accounts for a large percentage of the total data carried on the Internet. Due to the rapid changes of the Internet in terms of access technologies and core network bandwidth, the performance of long-haul transmission in the current Internet environment has not been well understood. In our research, we chose three typical long-haul paths (national, international yet continental, international and intercontinental) and studied their performance under a variety of access rates: dial-up, ADSL, ADSL2, and best-effort. Our results show that as long as the paths are within one continent, the long-haul transmission will be very reliable. However, intercontinental transmission suffers seriously from bandwidth fluctuation and packet retransmission.