Experimental Evaluation of Desktop Operating Systems Networking Performance

Abstract

The rapid advancement of network, communication and Internet technology resulted with always-on, always-connected, device-independent and remote online working, business, education and entertainment environment. Consequently, users are searching for solutions and technologies that enable fast and reliable wide area network connection and the typical solution is through using personal computers connected with ethernet cable to network equipment and infrastructure that supports gigabit ethernet connection. Besides the complex network infrastructure that can influence performance, the bottleneck can also be caused by insufficient hardware, operating system and software resources on clients’ machines. Therefore, in this paper a networking performance evaluation of three globally most common and most used versions of Windows operating systems; namely Windows 7^TM, Windows 8.1^TM and Windows 10^TM, on two identical computer systems, is conducted. Networking performance measurements are performed with three different benchmarks: namely iPerf, D-ITG and NetStress. Performance evaluation results showed that a newer versions of an operating system bring certain networking performance improvements but by sacrificing other performances.