Experimental analysis of layered Ethernet software
Bharat Bhargava, Thomas Mueller, John Riedl · Fall joint computer conference · 1987
We conducted a series of experiments contrasting the performance of a standard communications protocol with the performance of modified versions of the protocol. The results of these experiments divide the communications delay in Sun's implementation of UDP/IP on a 10 megabit per second Ethernet into categories such as buffer copying, context switching, protocol layering, internet address translation, and checksum computation. We also describe the implementation of our own simple Ethernet protocol which propagates messages in slightly less than half the time required by UDP/IP. Our experimental results indicate that the most expensive of these are socket layering and connection, even though most of the layering in the UDP/IP implementation is incidental to the protocol.