On parameter tuning of data transfer protocol GridFTP for wide-area grid computing

In wide-area grid computing, geographically distributed computational resources are connected for enabling efficient and large-scale scientific/engineering computations. In the wide-area grid computing, a data transfer protocol called GridFTP has been commonly used for large file transfers. GridFTP has the following features for solving problems of the existing TCP. First, for accelerating the start-up in TCP's slow start phase and achieving high throughput in TCP's congestion avoidance phase, multiple TCP connections can be established in parallel. Second, according to the bandwidth-delay product of a network, the TCP socket buffer size can be negotiated between GridFTP server and client. However, in the literature, sufficient investigation has not been performed either on the optimal number of TCP connections or the optimal TCP socket buffer size. In this paper, we therefore quantitatively investigate the optimal parameter configuration of GridFTP in terms of the number of TCP connections and the TCP socket buffer size. We first derive performance metrics of GridFTP in steady state (i.e., goodput and packet loss probability). We then derive the optimal parameter configuration for GridFTP and quantitatively show performance limitations of GridFTP through several numerical examples. We also demonstrate validity of our approximate analysis by comparing simulation results with analytic ones.