A fragmentation control approach in jumbo frame network

Abstract

Nowadays, an amazing growth of the Internet has impacted tremendously on the network’s capability; from hundreds to thousands of Gigabits/s in the center of the network as well as at the access, and may soon to see an amazing amount of packets that needs to be processed. In the future, such a remarkable growth, there is an urgent need for an integration of packets of bigger sizes, called Jumbo frames. Jumbo frame is an approach that permits higher utilization as it decrease the amount of packets processed by the core routers while not having any adverse impact on the link utilization of fairness. The one major problem faced by Jumbo frame networks is that network paths are set not to transmit Jumbo frame capable end-to-end. This approach can’t provide a reasonable performance; as in reality, many paths have bigger Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU)s and many Internet networking gear do support bigger MTUs and the performance is highly depends on the size of a packet. This process leads to suboptimal throughput and is wasting Internet resources. Therefore, it is advantageous to discover the link MTU in order to avoid fragmentation when dealing with Jumbo frame. This research proposes the use of the MTU discovery method with Jumbo frame and the modified IP fragmentation mechanism which are used with the Jumbo frame network to reduce packet drop and throughput by decreasing the overhead in the network. And also, on how to discover the return effective MTU for Jumbo frame situation. For the purpose of evaluation, network simulator NS-2.28 was set up together with Jumbo frame and the proposed methods. Moreover, to justify the research objectives, the proposed algorithm and technique for MTU discovery with Jumbo frame were compared against the existing MTU handling mechanism and techniques that are found in the literature review using simulation metrics such as packet drop and throughput.