Simulation Analysis of TCP and XTP File Transfers in ATM Networks
Marco Ajmone Marsan, Mario Baldi, Andrea G. Bianco, Renato Lo Cigno, Maurizio Matteo Munafò · 1997
In this paper we study the TCP and XTP transport protocols in light of their possible use for applications running over B-ISDN in a IJBR-like context. In particular, we investigate the performance of file transfer applications taking into account both the impact of the ATM layer protocols and the features of the adopted transport protocol. The investigation is performed by simulation, using CLASS, a simulation tool for the study of ATM networks at the cell and burst levels, and considering quite a simple topology, known as the bottleneck topology, where TCP or XTP connections share a bottleneck link with some interfering background traffic, that is taken to have either Poisson or ON-OFF characteristics. Although the two transport protocols have quite different features, their performances are rather similar in almost all the considered scenarios. However, when XTP and TCP connections are mixed within the same network, the TCP performance is dramatically worse than that achieved by XTP, due to a more aggressive policy of XTP in the access to the transmission medium: a behavior that should raise some concern about the performance achievable when mixing different transport protocols on the same network.