Window flow control on a trunked byte-stream virtual circuit

The throughput versus window-size behavior of the sliding window protocol is studied on a trunked byte-stream virtual circuit. For the case studied, the node service discipline is processor sharing, background traffic is Poisson with exponentially distributed message lengths, propagation times are a significant fraction of the total delay, and the channel error rate is negligible. Analytic models are compared to the results of simulation. For small windows, the throughput is controlled by the ratio of window size to roundtrip propagation time. For large windows, the throughput is controlled by the background traffic level, the number of hops, and the ratio of window size to background message length