Effect of Packet-Size over Network Performance

TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is the most widely-used protocol on Internet. It divides one large data into small sized packets, called segments. Segmentation is useful for improving network performance. It has a major problem in that its congestion control algorithm does not allow flows to obtain full available bandwidth during fast long-distance links. One of the tools for evaluating TCP performance in various network scenarios is Network Simulator-2 (NS-2). By using this tool one can simulate and evaluate the performance of different TCP algorithms. In fast network one of the factors that degrade the TCP performance is packet size. Increasing the packet size decreased the throughput of network, reason being that after crossing dedicated packet size, it will allocate double the required packet size and fill up garbage in the unallocated packet space, thus decreasing the throughput.