Progress in the field of high speed networking and distributed applications has led to a debate in the research community on the suitability of existing protocols such as TCP/IP for emerging applications over high-speed networks. Protocols have to operate in a complex environment comprised of various operating systems, host architectures, and a rapidly growing and evolving internet of several heterogeneous subnetworks. Thus, evaluation of protocols is definitely a challenging task that cannot

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... achieved by studying protocols in isolation. This paper presents results of a study which attempts to characterize the performance of the SunOS Inter-Process Communication (IPC) and TCP/IP protocols for distributed, high-bandwidth applications. The software examined is the SunOS 4.0.3 IPC using BSD stream sockets on top of TCP/IP. SunOS 4.0.3 is based on 4.3 BSD Unix (for further details on BSD Unix IPC implementation, see [11] ). The hardware were two Sun