The effects of long delay and transmission errors on the performance of TP-4 implementations

A set of tools have been developed that allows the authors to measure and examine the effects of transmission delay and errors on the performance of TP-4 implementations. The tools give insight into both the large- and small-scale behaviors of an implementation. The authors have systematically applied these tools to a commercial implementation of TP-4. Measurements show, among other things, that a two-second one-way transmission delay and an effective bit-error rate of one error per 100000 bits can result in a 95% reduction in TP-4 throughput. The detailed statistics that were collected give insight into why transmission delay and errors affect this implementation so significantly and support a number of 'lessons learned' that could be applied to TP-4 implementations that operate more robustly across networks with long transmission delays and transmission errors.<>