DTPD: Data Transfer Tool Performance Diagnosis System in High Speed Networks

Abstract

As the need for large data transmission is increased, the speed of network is also increased. Although the performance of the network is improved, the real data transmission over the high performance network is not improved as we expected. This is because most of host systems are optimized for the old low speed network. Indeed, the host system itself acts as the bottleneck. There are many researches to solve this problem. NDT and NPAD are the most famous projects. To achieve a high speed transmission, they provide a method for diagnosing problems in the network and end-systems that are the most common causes of all severe performance degradation over end-to-end paths. In spite of these efforts, the performance of data transmission is still limited if some data transfer tools such as SCP, SFTP, RSYNC are used. The reason is that the data transfer tools have some internal data transmission control mechanisms which can limit the transmission rate. In this case, end users have to use another efficient data transfer tool but it is difficult for them to find out the internal problem of the tools. Thus, experts have to provide a method for testing user’s tools and guidelines on tool selection to the end users. In this paper, we propose the DTPD which diagnose the data transfer tool by monitoring the window size of the data transmission connection between two end systems. By using the DTPD, end users can easily test their tools through web pages and may choose more efficient data transport tools.

“This research was supported by the MKE(Ministry of Knowledge Economy), Korea, under the ITRC(Information Technology Research Center) support program supervised by the IITA(Institute of Information Technology Advancement)” (IITA-2008-C1090-0801-0028).