Benchmarking High Bandwidth-Delay Product Protocols

TCP is the de facto transport protocol of the Internet, but its shortcomings in the large bandwidth and large latency networks is well documented. We create a set of benchmarks for protocols designed for the large bandwidth-delay product networks. By using the benchmarks to evaluate the leading protocols in network environments that vary in their bandwidth and latency, we found that each protocol far outperformed TCP, although each has its limitations. In the largest bandwidth-delay product environment we tested, PSockets achieved a maximum bandwidth of 875Mbps, while RBUDP and UDT were not far behind at 837Mbps and 840Mbps respectively, compared to 4.57Mbps for TCP. In achieving the high bandwidth, PSockets required user input to use 256 parallel sockets while RBUDP required predetermination of sending rate. UDT requires an orders of magnitude more data and time to achieve maximum bandwidth as compared to PSockets.