A packet loss aware parallel data transfer in a Grid environment

With the rapid development of network technologies, many applications require transferring data faster in a wide area environment such as Grid and the data possibly passes through a wireless network or a lossy network until they reach the destination. The static parallel data transfer scheme such as GridFTP, or the dynamic parallel data transfer scheme such as GridFTP-APT (Automatic Parameter Tuning) increase the bandwidth utilization, and aggregates higher throughput by creating multiple TCP connections between two-endpoints. However, both schemes do not consider the packet loss, which may degrade the throughputs of applications in a lossy network. This paper proposes a dynamic parallel data transfer scheme for a lossy network. When a packet loss is detected, the proposed scheme stores the records before the packet loss occurs. When the packet loss is relieved, it continues with the stored records, and ignores the records during the packet loss. We compare the performance of the proposed scheme with that of GridFTP-APT and show that the proposed scheme outperforms the GridFTP-APT in a lossy network.