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Bandwidth

In the context of endpoint fragmentation (given that the fragments are appropriate for the pathMTU), the bandwidth concern is inappropriate. Assuming that Kent and Mogul are correct that network efficiencies arise from using the pathMTU rather than the MTU of the originating link, fragments matching this pathMTU consume exactly the same bandwidth as they would were they datagrams of the same size. In other words, we rely on the pathMTU to determine the size of a fragment to send across the network rather than a packet. To the network, however, the fragment is still a packet.

With respect to bandwidth in general, Michael McGowan in his 1999 paper, ``Gigabit to Gigabyte and Beyond'' [McG99] states that ``100Mb/s Ethernet adapters are capable of near line-rate TCP/IP performance (91Mb/s) at approximately 15 Scaling this to Gigabit Ethernet rates, one would expect about 450Mb/s at 100 numbers.'' (McGowan, p.3) Clearly, as we move into the age of Gigabit Ethernet and other high-performance networking, interrupt handling and CPU utilization become the major bottleneck in efficient high-speed networks.




2000-07-01