A Study of Protocols for Grid Computing Environment

Using grid systems efficiently has to face many challenges. One of them is the efficient exchangeof data between distant components exacerbated by the diversity of existing protocols forcommunicating participants. Grid computing will reach its vast potential if and only if, theunderlying networking infrastructure is able to transfer data across quite long distances in a veryeffective manner. Experiences show that advanced distributed applications executed in existinglarge scale computational grids are often able to use only a small fraction of available bandwidth.The reason for such a poor performance is the TCP, which works only in low bandwidth and lowdelay networks. Several new transport protocols have been introduced, but a very few are widelyused in grid computing applications, these protocols can be categorized in three broad categoriesviz. TCP based, UDP based and Application layer protocols. We study these protocols andpresent its performance and research activities that can be done in these protocols.