Abstract

This technical report summarizes the results of the SIMCO performance measurements with different transport protocols. SIMCO (SImple Middlebox COnfiguration) is a signaling protocol that can be used for controlling middleboxes such as firewalls and network address translators - small cable/DSL routers as well as large gateways between VoIP carrier networks, policing thousands of simultaneous calls. In the latter case, optimizing the SIMCO response time is important, as this contributes to the call setup delay perceived by the user in a negative way. SIMCO assumes to be transmitted over a reliable transport layer protocol. However, it requires only partial in-order delivery of messages. Using a Linux and Solaris based prototype implementation and a wide area network emulator, the SIMCO transaction response time was measured both for TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) as transport layer protocols, with different parameter settings and for different workloads. The measurement results reveal clear advantages of using SCTP, especially in scenarios with medium to high transaction rates.

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