Measurements of a transport implementation running over an IEEE 802.3 local area network

Abstract

The authors assess the performance of a typical commercially available implementation of the lower four layers of the Open System Interconnection (OSI) reference model (transport, network, data link, and physical). One-way delay and throughput measurements are reported for the Intel 310 microcomputer system running the iNA960 implementation of OSI transport over an IEEE 802.3 CSMA/CD (carrier-sense multiple-access with collision detection) local area network. The minimum one-way delay versus message size for various combinations of the lower four OSI layers is shown. These results show the increase in delay associated with increased protocol services. The maximum throughput for the Transport Class 4 service is reported and the effect of the main factors affecting maximum throughput is captured in a set of equations that are applicable to many implementations of transport and below.<>