NetPIPE readily provides the information necessary to answer the questions posed at the beginning of this paper. Also, there are various other questions concerning network performance which can be answered by careful examination and interpretation of the signature and saturation graphs generated by NetPIPE.
NetPIPE encapsulates the best of ttcp and netperf and gives a visualization of the network performance. Most importantly NetPIPE is clearly a protocol independent performance tool. It is valuable when comparing different networks and protocols. Using NetPIPE, we have clearly shown the overhead associated with different protocol layers. While ease of use is gained by uniform protocols, network bandwidth and latency are measurably sacrificed. We also foresee being able to visualize the difference in performance for other network protocols as well: token ring, HiPPI, etc.