This paper reports a series of experiments to measure TCP performance
when transferring data through an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) swi
tch, The results show that TCP buffer sizes and the ATM interface maxi
mum transmission unit have a dramatic impact on throughput. We observe
a throughput anomaly iu which an increase in the receiver's buffer si
ze decreases throughput substantially. For example, when using a 16K o
ctet send buffer and ATM Adaptation Layer 5 on a 100 megabit per secon
d (Mb/s) ATM path, the mean throughput for a bulk transfer drops from
15.05 Mb/s to 0.322 Mb/s if the receiver's buffer size is increased fr
om 16K octets to 24K octets. This paper analyzes the performance, expl
ains the anomalous behavior, and describes a solution that prevents th
e anomaly from occurring.