# Network performance

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Network performance refers to measures of service quality of a network as seen by the customer.

Service quality (SQ), in its contemporary conceptualisation, is a comparison of perceived expectations (E) of a service with perceived performance (P), giving rise to the equation SQ=P-E. This conceptualistion of service quality has its origins in the expectancy-disconfirmation paradigm.

## Contents

There are many different ways to measure the performance of a network, as each network is different in nature and design. Performance can also be modeled and simulated instead of measured; one example of this is using state transition diagrams to model queuing performance or to use a Network Simulator.

## Performance measures

The following measures are often considered important:

• Bandwidth commonly measured in bits/second is the maximum rate that information can be transferred
• Throughput is the actual rate that information is transferred
• Latency the delay between the sender and the receiver decoding it, this is mainly a function of the signals travel time, and processing time at any nodes the information traverses
• Jitter variation in packet delay at the receiver of the information
• Error rate the number of corrupted bits expressed as a percentage or fraction of the total sent

### Bandwidth

The available channel bandwidth and achievable signal-to-noise ratio determine the maximum possible throughput. It is not generally possible to send more data than dictated by the Shannon-Hartley Theorem.

### Throughput

Throughput is the number of messages successfully delivered per unit time. Throughput is controlled by available bandwidth, as well as the available signal-to-noise ratio and hardware limitations. Throughput for the purpose of this article will be understood to be measured from the arrival of the first bit of data at the receiver, to decouple the concept of throughput from the concept of latency. For discussions of this type the terms 'throughput' and 'bandwidth' are often used interchangeably.

The Time Window is the period over which the throughput is measured. Choice of an appropriate time window will often dominate calculations of throughput, and whether latency is taken into account or not will determine whether the latency affects the throughput or not.

### Latency

The speed of light imposes a minimum propagation time on all electromagnetic signals. It is not possible to reduce the latency below

The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted c, is a universal physical constant important in many areas of physics. Its exact value is 299,792,458 metres per second. It is exact because by international agreement a metre is defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 second. According to special relativity, c is the maximum speed at which all conventional matter and hence all known forms of information in the universe can travel. Though this speed is most commonly associated with light, it is in fact the speed at which all massless particles and changes of the associated fields travel in vacuum. Such particles and waves travel at c regardless of the motion of the source or the inertial reference frame of the observer. In the special and general theories of relativity, c interrelates space and time, and also appears in the famous equation of mass–energy equivalence E = mc2.

${\displaystyle t=s/c_{m}}$

where s is the distance and cm is the speed of light in the medium. This approximately means 1 extra millisecond roundtrip time (RTT) for 100 km/62miles of distance between hosts.

Other delays also occur in intermediate nodes. In packet switched networks delays can occur due to queueing.

### Jitter

Jitter is the undesired deviation from true periodicity of an assumed periodic signal in electronics and telecommunications, often in relation to a reference clock source. Jitter may be observed in characteristics such as the frequency of successive pulses, the signal amplitude, or phase of periodic signals. Jitter is a significant, and usually undesired, factor in the design of almost all communications links (e.g., USB, PCI-e, SATA, OC-48). In clock recovery applications it is called timing jitter. [1]

Electronics comprises the physics, engineering, technology and applications that deal with the emission, flow and control of electrons in vacuum and matter. The identification of the electron in 1897, along with the invention of the vacuum tube, which could amplify and rectify small electrical signals, inaugurated the field of electronics and the electron age.

In electronics and especially synchronous digital circuits, a clock signal is a particular type of signal that oscillates between a high and a low state and is used like a metronome to coordinate actions of digital circuits.

Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit of time. It is also referred to as temporal frequency, which emphasizes the contrast to spatial frequency and angular frequency. The period is the duration of time of one cycle in a repeating event, so the period is the reciprocal of the frequency. For example: if a newborn baby's heart beats at a frequency of 120 times a minute, its period—the time interval between beats—is half a second. Frequency is an important parameter used in science and engineering to specify the rate of oscillatory and vibratory phenomena, such as mechanical vibrations, audio signals (sound), radio waves, and light.

### Error rate

In digital transmission, the number of bit errors is the number of received bits of a data stream over a communication channel that have been altered due to noise, interference, distortion or bit synchronization errors.

The bit is a basic unit of information in information theory, computing, and digital communications. The name is a portmanteau of binary digit.

In connection-oriented communication, a data stream is a sequence of digitally encoded coherent signals used to transmit or receive information that is in the process of being transmitted. Data Stream is a set of extracted information from data provider. It contains raw data that was gathered out of users’ browser behavior from websites, where a dedicated pixel is placed. Data Stream is useful for data scientists for Big Data and AI algorithms supply. Main data stream providers are Data technology companies: OnAudience.com, Lotame, ShareThis, AddThis, 33 Across.

A communication channel or simply channel refers either to a physical transmission medium such as a wire, or to a logical connection over a multiplexed medium such as a radio channel in telecommunications and computer networking. A channel is used to convey an information signal, for example a digital bit stream, from one or several senders to one or several receivers. A channel has a certain capacity for transmitting information, often measured by its bandwidth in Hz or its data rate in bits per second.

The bit error rate or bit error ratio (BER) is the number of bit errors divided by the total number of transferred bits during a studied time interval. BER is a unitless performance measure, often expressed as a percentage.

In mathematics, a percentage is a number or ratio expressed as a fraction of 100. It is often denoted using the percent sign, "%", or the abbreviations "pct.", "pct"; sometimes the abbreviation "pc" is also used. A percentage is a dimensionless number.

The bit error probabilitype is the expectation value of the BER. The BER can be considered as an approximate estimate of the bit error probability. This estimate is accurate for a long time interval and a high number of bit errors.

### Interplay of factors

All of the factors above, coupled with user requirements and user perceptions, play a role in determining the perceived 'fastness' or utility, of a network connection. The relationship between throughput, latency, and user experience is most aptly understood in the context of a shared network medium, and as a scheduling problem.

## Algorithms and protocols

For some systems, latency and throughput are coupled entities. In TCP/IP, latency can also directly affect throughput. In TCP connections, the large bandwidth-delay product of high latency connections, combined with relatively small TCP window sizes on many devices, effectively causes the throughput of a high latency connection to drop sharply with latency. This can be remedied with various techniques, such as increasing the TCP congestion window size, or more drastic solutions, such as packet coalescing, TCP acceleration, and forward error correction, all of which are commonly used for high latency satellite links.

TCP acceleration converts the TCP packets into a stream that is similar to UDP. Because of this, the TCP acceleration software must provide its own mechanisms to ensure the reliability of the link, taking the latency and bandwidth of the link into account, and both ends of the high latency link must support the method used.

In the Media Access Control (MAC) layer, performance issues such as throughput and end-to-end delay are also addressed.

## Examples of latency or throughput dominated systems

Many systems can be characterized as dominated either by throughput limitations or by latency limitations in terms of end-user utility or experience. In some cases, hard limits such as the speed of light present unique problems to such systems and nothing can be done to correct this. Other systems allow for significant balancing and optimization for best user experience.

### Satellite telephony

A telecom satellite in geosynchronous orbit imposes a path length of at least 71000 km between transmitter and receiver. [2] which means a minimum delay between message request and message receipt, or latency of 473 ms. This delay can be very noticeable and affects satellite phone service regardless of available throughput capacity.

### Deep space communication

These long path length considerations are exacerbated when communicating with space probes and other long-range targets beyond Earth's atmosphere. The Deep Space Network implemented by NASA is one such system that must cope with these problems. Largely latency driven, the GAO has criticized the current architecture. [3] Several different methods have been proposed to handle the intermittent connectivity and long delays between packets, such as delay-tolerant networking. [4]

### Even deeper space communication

At interstellar distances, the difficulties in designing radio systems that can achieve any throughput at all are massive. In these cases, maintaining communication is a bigger issue than how long that communication takes.

### Offline data transport

Transportation is concerned almost entirely with throughput, which is why physical deliveries of backup tape archives are still largely done by vehicle.

## Notes

1. Roddy, 2001, 67 - 90
2. U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO), 2006
3. Kevin Fall, 2003

## Related Research Articles

Latency is a time interval between the stimulation and response, or, from a more general point of view, a time delay between the cause and the effect of some physical change in the system being observed. Latency is physically a consequence of the limited velocity with which any physical interaction can propagate. The magnitude of this velocity is always less than or equal to the speed of light. Therefore, every physical system will experience some sort of latency, regardless of the nature of stimulation that it has been exposed to.

Quality of service (QoS) is the description or measurement of the overall performance of a service, such as a telephony or computer network or a cloud computing service, particularly the performance seen by the users of the network. To quantitatively measure quality of service, several related aspects of the network service are often considered, such as packet loss, bit rate, throughput, transmission delay, availability, jitter, etc.

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the main protocols of the Internet protocol suite. It originated in the initial network implementation in which it complemented the Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP. TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of octets (bytes) between applications running on hosts communicating via an IP network. Major internet applications such as the World Wide Web, email, remote administration, and file transfer rely on TCP. Applications that do not require reliable data stream service may use the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), which provides a connectionless datagram service that emphasizes reduced latency over reliability.

In general terms, throughput is the rate of production or the rate at which something is processed.

In electronics and telecommunications, jitter is the deviation from true periodicity of a presumably periodic signal, often in relation to a reference clock signal. In clock recovery applications it is called timing jitter. Jitter is a significant, and usually undesired, factor in the design of almost all communications links.

Traffic shaping is a bandwidth management technique used on computer networks which delays some or all datagrams to bring them into compliance with a desired traffic profile. Traffic shaping is used to optimize or guarantee performance, improve latency, or increase usable bandwidth for some kinds of packets by delaying other kinds. It is often confused with traffic policing, the distinct but related practice of packet dropping and packet marking.

Network congestion in data networking and queueing theory is the reduced quality of service that occurs when a network node or link is carrying more data than it can handle. Typical effects include queueing delay, packet loss or the blocking of new connections. A consequence of congestion is that an incremental increase in offered load leads either only to a small increase or even a decrease in network throughput.

Satellite Internet access is Internet access provided through communications satellites. Modern consumer grade satellite Internet service is typically provided to individual users through geostationary satellites that can offer relatively high data speeds, with newer satellites using Ku band to achieve downstream data speeds up to 506 Mbit/s.

Throughput of a network can be measured using various tools available on different platforms. This page explains the theory behind what these tools set out to measure and the issues regarding these measurements.

ZMODEM is a file transfer protocol developed by Chuck Forsberg in 1986, in a project funded by Telenet in order to improve file transfers on their X.25 network. In addition to dramatically improved performance compared to older protocols, ZMODEM also offered restartable transfers, auto-start by the sender, an expanded 32-bit CRC, and control character quoting supporting 8-bit clean transfers, allowing it to be used on networks that would not pass control characters. ZMODEM became extremely popular on bulletin board systems (BBS) in the early 1990s, displacing earlier protocols such as XMODEM and YMODEM.

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) uses a network congestion-avoidance algorithm that includes various aspects of an additive increase/multiplicative decrease (AIMD) scheme, with other schemes such as slow start and congestion window to achieve congestion avoidance. The TCP congestion-avoidance algorithm is the primary basis for congestion control in the Internet. Per the end-to-end principle, congestion control is largely a function of internet hosts, not the network itself. There are several variations and versions of the algorithm implemented in protocol stacks of operating systems of computers that connect to the Internet.

TCP tuning techniques adjust the network congestion avoidance parameters of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections over high-bandwidth, high-latency networks. Well-tuned networks can perform up to 10 times faster in some cases. However, blindly following instructions without understanding their real consequences can hurt performance as well.

Packet loss occurs when one or more packets of data travelling across a computer network fail to reach their destination. Packet loss is either caused by errors in data transmission, typically across wireless networks, or network congestion. Packet loss is measured as a percentage of packets lost with respect to packets sent.

Bandwidth management is the process of measuring and controlling the communications on a network link, to avoid filling the link to capacity or overfilling the link, which would result in network congestion and poor performance of the network. Bandwidth is measured in bits per second (bit/s) or bytes per second (B/s).

In computer networks, goodput is the application-level throughput of a communication; i.e. the number of useful information bits delivered by the network to a certain destination per unit of time. The amount of data considered excludes protocol overhead bits as well as retransmitted data packets. This is related to the amount of time from the first bit of the first packet sent until the last bit of the last packet is delivered.

In computing, Microsoft's Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 introduced in 2007/2008 a new networking stack named Next Generation TCP/IP stack, to improve on the previous stack in several ways. The stack includes native implementation of IPv6, as well as a complete overhaul of IPv4. The new TCP/IP stack uses a new method to store configuration settings that enables more dynamic control and does not require a computer restart after a change in settings. The new stack, implemented as a dual-stack model, depends on a strong host-model and features an infrastructure to enable more modular components that one can dynamically insert and remove.

In computing, bandwidth is the maximum rate of data transfer across a given path. Bandwidth may be characterized as network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth.

ITU-T Y.156sam Ethernet Service Activation Test Methodology is a draft recommendation under study by the ITU-T describing a new testing methodology adapted to the multiservice reality of packet-based networks.

ITU-T Y.1564 is an Ethernet service activation test methodology, which is the new ITU-T standard for turning up, installing and troubleshooting Ethernet-based services. It is the only standard test methodology that allows for complete validation of Ethernet service-level agreements (SLAs) in a single test.

## References

• Rappaport, Theodore S. (2002). Wireless communications : principles and practice (2 ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR. ISBN   0-13-042232-0.
• Roddy, Dennis (2001). Satellite communications (3. ed.). New York [u.a.]: McGraw-Hill. ISBN   0-07-137176-1.
• Fall, Kevin, "A Delay-Tolerant Network Architecture for Challenged Internets", Intel Corporation, February, 2003, Doc No: IRB-TR-03-003
• Government Accountability Office (GAO) report 06-445, NASA'S DEEP SPACE NETWORK: Current Management Structure is Not Conducive to Effectively Matching Resources with Future Requirements, April 27, 2006