Interconnecting LANs for Real Time Traffic Application

Abstract

This work deals with the flow control of real time traffic in communication systems interconnecting multiple LAN-s through a gateway or over a high speed backbone. Multiple LAN-s connected to a WAN, or over a MAN are typical examples of systems belonging to these categories. The systems under consideration, LAN-s or gateway, have a finite set of buffers, and packets destined to the gateway or a destination LAN and that cannot be stored are considered lost. We propose and investigate flow control which can minimize probability of loss, without packet retransmission. Traffic control is studied for geographically adjacent systems, as well as for interconnected systems in which the packet transfer time is nonnegligible. An approximate Analytical model is introduced, which is used to set optimal control parameters, and derive the interconnected system performance in terms of packet loss probability, throughput and the average packet delay. It is shown that the use of the proposed control mechanism can significantly reduce the packet loss probability.

The work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under NCR-014317, and by the Army Research Office under contract DAAL03–91-LG-0070