Queuing analysis of a shared buffer strategy for transport-layer connections

The performance of transport-layer connections with buffer sharing is investigated. The authors consider the scenario of multiple sender hosts and a single receiver host which are connected through a transport network. Application-layer processes in the sender hosts generate messages which are transferred to a peer process in the receiver host. Messages are transferred over window flow-controlled end-to-end connections between transport-layer entities. Buffer space in the host machines is assumed to be limited and thus process blocking can occur. It is assumed that the buffers are shared between the transport and higher layer entities. The performance model developed considers the system to be composed of two submodels: sender and receiver. The analysis technique used develops a queuing model for each submodel, and approximate results are obtained through an iterative solution method, using the results of one submodel as input to the other. This analysis is then applied to obtain performance characteristics for two example systems