TRANSPORT MEASUREMENTS OVER AN ETHERNET LAN

The performance evaluation of transport protocols is a relevant step f or designing efficient distributed applications. This analysis can be performed either with an unloaded medium or in the presence of backgro und load. In this latter case, the effects of the interaction with oth er users are made evident, but remarkable difficulties exist to obtain a reproducible network load and to achieve accuracy in measurements. In this paper, performance measurements in the presence of background load are presented for TCP and UDP in the Internet family, and SPP and IDP in the Xerox Network System family. Experiments were carried out over an Ethernet LAN with MS-DOS AT-class stations.