Breaking News - Networking:

PSC Researchers Present Drafts For Improving Network Performance

Researchers from PSC's Advanced Networking group will present their latest ideas for improving Internet Performance to the 60th Internet Engineering Task Force. This work describes a better method for Path MTU Discovery, and the Internet-Drafts -- by PSC networking researchers Matt Mathis and John Heffner -- are already published on the IETF Web site for review by IETF and other interested people.

The Internet-Drafts can be downloaded from the IETF site:

Path MTU Discovery describes a method to automatically assess the best Maximum Transfer Unit (MTU) -- the biggest data packet a connection can efficiently use -- for a given network connection. Network performance can be hindered by using the wrong MTU. The Internet-Drafts are a first step in an effort to establish a standard method for optimizing packet size for any connection.

Research into Path MTU Discovery was made possible through a grant from Cisco System Inc.