Performance evaluation of backbone technologies in distributed systems

Abstract

The backbone of a distributed system is the interior-most part of the communication network which carries traffic generated from several sources. Applications such as accessing the Internet, multimedia, etc., demand a lot of bandwidth from the network. This demand is multiplied at the network backbone as the traffic from several sources aggregates here. The advent of switched networks has reduced these problems to some extent by providing greater available bandwidth to each user by reducing the sharing of transmission links. As users demand more bandwidth, the backbone becomes a potential bottleneck in the network. There are primarily three technologies competing to be used at the backbone:

Fast Ethernet Gigabit Ethernet ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode)

In this thesis, we make a performance study of these three technologies. We also evaluate the effect of server placement on the performance of the system. We use detailed queueing models for our simulation study and a network model representative of current systems. Such systems have the potential to cause congestion at the backbone. Our simulation results show that:

Fast Ethernet performed poorly in comparison with Gigabit Ethernet and ATM. Reconfiguration of a Fast Ethernet backbone by moving file servers around improved performance considerably, but still fell short of the performance of Gigabit Ethernet and ATM. Systems with Gigabit Ethernet and ATM backbones performed almost equally well.