Experimental Evaluation of SUNOS IPC and TCP/IP Protocol Implementation

Progress in the field of high-speed networking and distributed applications has lead to a debate in the research community on the suitability of existing protocols such as TCP/IP for emerging applications over high-speed networks. Protocols have to operate in a complex environment comprised of various operating systems, host architectures, and a rapidly growing and evolving internet of several heterogeneous subnetworks. Thus, evaluation of protocols is definitely a challenging task that cannot be achieved by studying protocols in isolation. This paper presents results of a study which attempts to characterize the performance of SunOS Inter-Process Communication (IPC) and TCP/IP protocol implementation for distributed high-bandwidth applications. Components studied include queueing in different layers, protocol control mechanisms (such as flow and error control), per-packet processing, buffer requirements, and interaction with the operating system.