Performance of a GridFTP overlay network

TCP is widely deployed and is used by GridFTP for data transfers within grid environments. Due to TCP dynamics, throughput of data transfers can be much lower than the available bandwidth in wide area networks. Splitting a TCP connection into segments has been shown to improve throughput in this setting. This paper presents a set of components that enable deployment of overlay networks that use split-TCP connections to improve GridFTP transfer performance. Emulation demonstrates the conditions for which, splitting a TCP connection is most useful and reveals a significant source of overhead. Empirical results demonstrate significant performance improvement despite using intermittent, passive throughput observations to choose proxies.