Abstract

Computer networking technology has seen explosive growth over the past thirty years. Along with the rapid development of high speed communication media, the demand for a more efficient transport layer protocol is increasing. Many research activities have been devoted to this area. The Xpress Transport Protocol (XTP) is one such example. XTP was designed to fix some deficiencies in the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and to provide a highly efficiency transport service. This thesis presents the simulation of the error control procedures of XTP by using a simulation tool called SMURPH (System for Modeling Unslotted Real-time Phenomena), which is an object-oriented configurable simulator. Ethernet is the chosen LAN environment for the simulation of XTP in SMURPH. The simulation results show that XTP has excellent performance, even for large file transfers in an environment with high bit error rates. The excellent performance of XTP is due to the excellent design decisions made for the error control mechanisms. Fiber optic transmission medium is rapidly becoming available for communication networks. The low bit error rates are a beneficial result of the move toward fiber optic networks. The thesis thus investigates the performance of XTP and the behavior of the XTP error control for bulk transferring in a low bit error rate environment. The thesis also studies the Ethernet Capture Effect problem, which results in performance degradation of XTP simulation. The thesis shows that XTP can overcome the Ethernet Capture Effect by using an enhanced backoff algorithm for its collision resolution.