DetectingDuplexMismatchonEthernet-Passiveand.PDFVIP

Detecting Duplex Mismatch on Ethernet Stanislav Shalunov and Richard Carlson {shalunov,rcarlson}@ Abstract. IEEE 802.3 Ethernet networks, a standard LAN environ- ment, provide a way to auto-negotiate the settings of capacity (10, 100, or 1000 Mb/s) and duplex (full- or half-). Under certain conditions de- scribed below, the auto-negotiation protocol fails to work properly. The resultant configuration problem, duplex mismatch, appears to be com- mon; when this problem occurs, the connectivity is impaired, but not completely removed. This can result in performance problems that are hard to locate. This paper describes a work in progress aimed at (i) studying the condi- tion of duplex mismatch in IEEE 802.3 Ethernet networks, (ii) produc- ing an analytical model of duplex mismatch, (iii) validating the model, (iv) studying the effects of duplex mismatch on TCP throughput, (v) de- signing an algorithm for duplex mismatch detection using data from active testing, and (vi) incorporating the detection algorithm into an existing open-source network troubleshooting tool (NDT). 1 Introduction Ethernet duplex mismatch is a condition that occurs when two devices commu- nicating over an IEEE 802.3 Ethernet link (typically, a host and a switch) do not agree on the duplex mode of the direct Ethernet connection between them; the switch might operate as if the connection were full-duplex with the host operating in half-duplex mode, or vice versa (section 2 describes the condition in more detail). Duplex mismatch causes some packets to be lost (see section 3) and, in many cases, leads to serious performance degradation (see section 4.2). Section 5 discusses so