Performance Comparison Of SNA And TCP/IP In Computer Network Communications

TCP/IP is a well-known communication protocol. In1983, TCP/IP replaced the old network control protocol (NCP), thus becoming the cornerstone of today’s Internet. In the mid-1990s, TCP/IP experienced a period of rapid development. Until now, TCP/IP has been developed as the mainstream computer network protocol, which has a dominant positon.SNA is the proprietary network architecture of IBM, which is founded in1074. It has been widely used in the mainframe environment of IBM. In general, SNA is the major networking protocol of both IBM’s mainframe (ES/9000, S/390, etc.) and midrange (AS/400). In the long-term competitiveness with TCP/IP, SNA has revealed weakness. But where will be a long time before SNA exit the stage of history.The theoretical research of either SNA or TCP/IP is nearly saturated, and the industry has such a consensus that from the protocol is designed to run, it should serve in such areas. However, there is no corresponding laboratory data to compare their performance in multi-scene for analyzing the pros and cons. And the paper is designed for this purpose.The main part of the article describes the TCP/IP protocol, and has a focus interpretation of the TCP, which is the transport layer protocol. After analyzing the SNA network architecture, I compare the transport protocols of those two network architectures at the theoretical level.The article designs a simple peer-to-peer network and a multi-clients network. Based on those networks, I finish some testing work under different scenarios, which have different number of sessions. By analyzing the two networks with different performance, I compare the advantages and disadvantages of the major transport protocols of both SNA and TCP. And the conclusion is that, TCP/IP has better transmission efficiency, but SNA can maintain fairness better.