Holistic analysis of end-to-end high-speed data movement

The paper “Reexamining Paradigms of End-to-End Data Movement” analyzes bottlenecks in high-speed wide-area data transfer beyond raw network bandwidth using experimental testbeds and production measurements.

• Main finding: High-performance data transfer over 1–100 Gbps+ WAN links is often limited by non-core factors such as network latency, TCP congestion control, CPU performance, and virtualization, as demonstrated using a latency-emulation-capable testbed and an operational 100 Gbps link between Switzerland and California, U.S.
• Context and methodology: The authors examine six common paradigms of data movement across edge-to-core environments, show that principal bottlenecks reside outside the network core, and argue that holistic hardware–software co-design is required to align benchmark performance with complex production workflows; the study is published on arXiv (19 pages, 13 figures, DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2512.15028) under a CC BY 4.0 license.