Performance enhancement of TCP in high-speed networks

GridFTP is a secure and reliable high-performance parallel data transfer protocol used for transferring massive amounts of widely distributed data. Currently it allows users to configure the number of parallel streams and socket buffer size. However, its tuning procedure for optimal combination is a time consuming task. The socket handlers and buffers are important system resources and must therefore be carefully managed. In this paper, we propose a scheme to achieve high throughput even with a smaller buffer size, and also derive a regression equation to predict the optimal combination of resources for a connection. To improve the performance, the TCP based on our scheme obtains higher throughput and spends less memory for the same throughput than the original TCP scheme. In addition, the regression equation is verified by comparing measured and predicted values, and we apply the equation to an actual experiment on the KOrea advanced REsearch Network (KOREN). The result demonstrates that the equation provides excellent predictions with only an 8% error boundary. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.