High Speed TCP/IP Experiment over International ATM Test Bed
Tōru Hasegawa, Mitsuru Yamada, K. Hokamura, Kohei Yoshiizumi, Teruyuki Hasegawa, Toshihiko Kato, Linda Galasso, Hiroyuki Fujii · 1998
AT&T, KDD and NTT conducted a joint ATM trial called Multimedia Application Project (MAP) for the purpose of testing and validating network-based broadband multimedia applications and services between US and Japan. Although the Internet based network is promising for broadband multimedia communications, there is a performance problem that TCP is the throughput bottleneck in an international ATM network with large propagation delay. In MAP, the high speed TCP/IP experiment was jointly performed by the three companies with the leadership of KDD, for the purpose of validating the high speed TCP/IP infrastructure using TCP gateway proposed by KDD. In this infrastructure, a pair of TCP gateways are introduced in international ATM networks, and they improve the TCP throughput by introducing a link-by-link flow control and a sufficient window size between gateways, without any modifications to end terminals. In the high speed TCP/IP experiment, the throughput of TCP communications with and without TCP gateways were measured under various conditions. This paper describes the outline and the results of this experiment. The experiment was successful and the TCP gateways greatly improved the throughput of TCP based applications. For example, the response time of WWW access retrieving a 600 Kbyte image file was improved from 13.5 seconds to 2.6 seconds, and the ftp throughput was improved from 1.5 Mbps to 22 Mbps.