Performance of the Xpress transfer protocol in an Ethernet environment

A simulation analysis is presented of the performance of the Xpress transfer protocol (XTP), a high-speed protocol intended for fiber distributed data interface (FDDI) or Ethernet environments. The local area network simulation facility (LANSF) is modified to support virtual circuit simulation, and then used to obtain the XTP performance statistics. The chosen simulation LAN environment is Ethernet. The analysis of XTP shows that it can provide high throughput to transport users for bulk data movement operations such as file transfer. Its bandwidth for short transfers is limited by the necessity of carrying the overhead of packet headers, packet trailers, and acknowledgment packets. However, it is not worse than most other protocols in this respect