An Investigation into Transport Protocols and Data Transport ...

Abstract
The future of Grid technology relies on the successful and efficient movement
of control information and raw data around the world to interconnect
computers that form the backbone of the Internet. It has been estimated
that Petabytes of data will be replicated and consumed across many sites
worldwide in projects such as the LHC and AstroGrid. This thesis focuses
on the performance issues related to replicating such large volumes of data
across the Internet for the successful deployment of Grid in the near future.
More specifically, the main content of the thesis focuses on the reliable
transport protocols that are necessary for checkpoint and replication data. It
is shown that the existing Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) algorithms
are insufficient to make use of the increased network capacities of high speed
long distance networks. Many new proposals have been put forth to solve this
problem. They are described and extensively explored in a set of simulated,
lab-based and real-life tests in order to validate the theoretical models and
experimental results from real-world application.
As the issues of new transport protocols are not solely a matter of the total
achievable throughput for a single user, but a problem of network stability
and fairness, a set of performance parameters based on these metrics are also
investigated.
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