THE ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN NETWORK PERFORMANCE AND TCP THROUGHPUT

This report focuses on explaining how the TCP/IP protocol stack works and how data transfer is achieved across a network. The report starts with an in-depth investigation of the behaviour of TCP data transfers, focusing on the algorithms used to minimise or reduce the network congestion problems. Furthermore, emphasis is laid on the fact that TCP performance depends on the quality of TCP implementations and hence any mistakes can have catastrophic effects. The report continues with information about various tools that have been built to analyse automatically TCP implementations' behaviour. Nevertheless, TCP behaviour and performance depend largely on the network performance. The experimental part of the report examines several network impairments that affect throughput degrading the performance of a TCP connection. The results of the experiments suggest that both packet loss and delay affect TCP throughput negatively. The correctness of the findings is successfully benchmarked against TCP models. The report concludes with a discussion about the future of TCP. The growth of wireless and mobile computing raises the question of whether TCP can still remain the transport layer of choice for an Internet that allows hosts to use both wired and wireless connections. Several approaches that have been proposed to improve the performance of TCP in networks with wireless links are discussed in this context