SIMULATION COMPARISON OF BROAD-BAND NETWORKING TECHNOLOGIES

This paper describes a simulation study comparing delay and throughput performance of several access/backbone combinations of Frame Relay, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), and IEEE 802.6 broadband networking technologies. The comparisons are made using similar Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) configurations supporting integrated traffic from voice, video, data and image sources. Results include complete distributions for network and end-end delays. These delay distributions are obtained for different traffic loads and different numbers of network trunks in a connection. All of the configurations are capable of providing adequate delay performance at moderate network loads for real-time (voice and video) traffic, but significant differences are seen in data and image delay performance.