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Abstract : |
Examination of a trace of packets collected from the network is often the only method available for diagnosing protocol performance problems in computer networks. This thesis explores the use of packet traces to diagnose performance problems of the transport protocol TCP. Unfortunately, manual examination of these traces can be so tedious that e ective analysis is not possible. The primary contribution of this thesis is a graphical method for displaying the packet trace which greatly reduces the tediousness of examining a packet trace. The graphical method is demonstrated by the examination of some packet traces of typical TCP connections. The performance of two di erent implementations of TCP sending data across a particular network path is compared. Traces many thousands of packets long are used to demonstrate how e ectively the graphical method simpli es examination of long complicated traces. In the comparison of the two TCP implementations, the burstiness of the TCP transmitter appeared to be related to the achieved throughput. A method of quantifying, |
