Effects of channel bandwidth variation on performance of individual messages in spatially and temporally heterogeneous communication networks

Abstract

As the domain of communication systems grows, heterogeneity among computers and subnetworks employed for a task also increases. Channel bandwidth available for a message on a communication network varies with time and link. This variation can have a significant effect on performance of an individual message and also that of the network as a whole. Therefore, it is important to understand effects of bandwidth heterogeneity on the network performance in order to optimally utilize a heterogeneous communication network. The ability to use such a network optimally is highly desirable in many applications such as network-based dataintensive high performance computing. The main goal of this paper is to analyze effects of temporal and spatial heterogeneity on performance of individual messages in detail via an extensive simulation, in terms of throughput, endto-end delay, etc. Also, the problems of path selection and multi-path data transfer are considered to illustrate how the analysis results may be used in the future effort of optimizing the network performance by taking channel bandwidth heterogeneity into account.