Abstract

networks, have been getting faster, perceived throughput at the application has not always increased accordingly. Various performance bottlenecks have been encountered, each of which has to be analyzed and corrected. One aspect of networking often suspected of contributing to low throughput is the transport layer of the protocol suite. This layer, especially in connectionless protocols, has considerable functionality, and is typically executed in software by the host processor at the end points of the network. It is thus a likely source of processing overhead. While this theory is appealing, a preliminary examination suggested to us that other aspects of networking may be a more serious source of overhead. To test this proposition, a detailed study was made of a popular transport protocol, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) [I]. This paper provides results of that

Citations