The design and tuning of a transport protocol for local area networks

The authors examine the design and performance of LNTP, a connection-orientated transport-level protocol for local area networks (LANs) in the 4.2 BSD Unix operating system. Various measurements are taken, and LNTP´s performance is compared to that of TCP/IP (ARPAnet´s Transmission Control Protocol), a LHN protocol which is often used in LAN environments. The optimum values of various LNTP parameters are determined, some theoretically and others empirically. The theoretical results are compared to the experimentally observed values. It is concluded that LNTP does indeed outperform TCP/IP. However, due to the overhead of the non-LNTP specific protocol layers, this improvement is not as great as it might be. Nonetheless, LNTP proves itself to be a viable replacement for TCP/IP