Performance, overhead, and packetization characteristics of Java application level protocols

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a set of performance tests designed to determine the relative efficiencies of five different Java application level protocols used for peer-to-peer communications. Efficiency was determined by measuring transmission latency, number of packets sent, packetization of data, and bytes transmitted. The protocols tested include: datagram (UDP), DataStreams, ObjectStreams, Remote Method invocation, and Piped Streams. The tests revealed a great variation in packetization efficiency and latency between the protocols. A new record oriented data stream is proposed and prototyped and testing. Preliminary performance tests showed this new record oriented data stream to be several times more efficient than ObjectStreams.