Performance evaluation of UDP-based high-speed transport protocols

Abstract

The emergence of high speed long distance networks has promoted the development of various e-science applications. The traditional TCP protocol is not suitable for high bandwidth-delay product networks because of its conservative Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) congestion control algorithm and slow start strategy. This paper mainly introduces four kinds of typical UDP-based high speed transport protocols (RUBDP, Tsunami, UDT, and PA-UDP). By experiments on the test bed with end-to-end transport mode, the influence of the file size, loss ratio and RTT to the performance of the four protocols is evaluated. And, the intra-protocol fairness and inter-protocol fairness while transferring multiple parallel flows are also evaluated. The results show: PA-UDP protocol has the best transport performance; UDT protocol is the most convenient, because it does not require the users to set the initial sending rate, buffer size and other parameters.