The impact of transport protocol, packet size, and connection type on the round trip time

Abstract: While developing networking for games and applications, developers have a list of network specific requirements to be met as well as decide how to meet them. It is not always easy to decide what protocol is best suited for a given network configuration, or what is the best size of a data packet. By performing a comparative analysis, it becomes possible to identify how protocols, packet size, and network configuration impact the one-way travel time and throughput of a given implementation. The result shows how the different implementations compared against each other and the analysis tries to determine why they perform as they do. This gives a good overview of the pros and cons of how TCP, TCP(N), UDP, and RakNet, behave and perform over LANs and WLANs with varying packet size.