End-System Aware, Rate-Adaptive Protocol for Network Transport in LambdaGrid Environments

Abstract

Next-generation e-Science applications would require the ability to transfer information at high data rates between distributed computing centers and data repositories. A LambdaGrid offers dedicated, optical, circuit-switched, point-to-point connections that can be reserved exclusively for such applications. These dedicated high-speed connections eliminate network congestion as seen in traditional Internet, but they effectively push the network congestion to the end systems, as processing speeds cannot keep up with networking speeds. Thus, developing an efficient transport protocol over such high-speed dedicated circuits is of critical importance. We propose the idea of a end-system aware, rate-adaptive protocol for network transport, based on end-system performance monitoring. Our proposed protocol significantly improves the performance of data transfer over LambdaGrids by intelligently adapting the sending rate based on end-system constraints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed protocol and illustrate the performance gains achieved via wide-area network emulation