NFS dynamics over flow-controlled wide area networks

Author

Chang, Koling ; Morris, Robert ; Kung, H.T.

Author_Institution

Div. of Appl. Sci., Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA, USA

Volume

2

fYear

1997

fDate

7-12 Apr 1997

Firstpage

619

Abstract

The network file system protocol (NFS) has been the leading distributed file system for workstations since it was first introduced by Sun Microsystems in 1986. The geographical scale of NFS has been limited to the local area due to its relatively low performance on the wide area Internet. However, with the advent of high bandwidth wide area networks such as ATM, NFS over WANs may become more promising. In this paper, the performance of NFS over various sizes of WAN is studied The effects of ATM flow-control and queueing strategies on NFS are discussed, as are the performance of TCP and UDP as NFS transport protocols. The primary conclusion is that standard NFS over UDP works well over ATM WANs as long as ATM-level flow control keeps the cell loss rate under one percent. In some cases, NFS over TCP works badly with small packets due to unfortunate interactions with TCP´s congestion window

Keywords

asynchronous transfer mode; queueing theory; telecommunication congestion control; transport protocols; wide area networks; NFS dynamics; TCP; UDP; WAN; cell loss rate; congestion window; distributed file system; flow-control; flow-controlled wide area networks; high bandwidth wide area networks; network file system protocol; performance; queueing; transport protocols; Asynchronous transfer mode; Bandwidth; Error correction; File systems; Internet; Propagation delay; Protocols; Sun; Wide area networks; Workstations;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

INFOCOM '97. Sixteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Driving the Information Revolution., Proceedings IEEE

Conference_Location

Kobe

ISSN

0743-166X

Print_ISBN

0-8186-7780-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/INFCOM.1997.644513

Filename

644513