Simple Available Bandwidth Utilization Library for High-Speed Wide Area Networks

The growth of high-speed wide area networks (WANs) has enabled the emergence of new classes of data intensive, wide area computing applications, such as the remote analysis and exploration of data and distributed data mining. The de facto standard for reliable data transfers is the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Despite improvements in TCP over the years (to reduce overhead and achieve higher throughput), it is still a common experience for the end-to-end data rates of wide area data mining and data analysis applications to be inefficient. This paper introduces a library called SABUL (Simple Available Bandwidth Utilization Library) which merges features of UDP and TCP to produce a light-weight protocol with flow control, rate control and reliable transmission mechanisms that is designed for data intensive applications over wide area high performance networks. In this paper, we describe the library and give experimental evidence of its effectiveness.