An evaluation of object-based data transfers on high performance networks

We describe FOBS: a simple user-level communication protocol designed to take advantage of the available bandwidth in a high-bandwidth, high-delay network environment. We compare the performance of FOBS with that of TCP both with and without the so-called Large Window extensions designed to improve the performance of TCP in this type of network environment. It is shown that FOBS can obtain on the order of 90% of the available bandwidth across both short and long high-performance network connections. In the case of the long haul connection, this represents a bandwidth that is 1.8 times higher than that of the optimized TCP algorithm. Also, we demonstrate that the additional traffic placed on the network due to the greedy nature of the algorithm is quite reasonable, representing approximately 3% of the total data transferred.