Crashing Spacecraft and Crossing Continents: Summary of a Network Performance Investigation

The GÉANT2 project established a Performance Enhancement and Response Team (PERT) process [1] in 2004 to assist network users in troubleshooting network performance issues and provide information on how to optimize network performance. This paper presents a summary and conclusions of a PERT case where the aim was to transfer data from an eVLBI radio telescope in Chile to the Netherlands across academic IP backbones. As that path goes through highly utilized, bandwidth-challenged networks, involves a significant number of operators and networks, and has a very high (300+ ms) round-trip time, engineering a high and reliable transfer rate proved to be a challenge. The goal of this paper is to raise awareness of the PERT process so that more users could use it to solve their performance problems and to describe general observations which are applicable to other similar usage scenarios.