Performance evaluation of error recovery schemes in high speed networks

Error control in high-speed communication networks is usually applied either as a link-by-link scheme or as an end-to-end scheme. The authors propose analytic performance models for comparing the performance of the link-by-link and end-to-end approaches with respect to error control. The models consider the effects of packet error rate, propagation delays of messages, separate virtual-circuit finite buffers, and timeout mechanisms. It is shown that the average end-to-end packet delay is affected by the packet error rate, the buffer size, the number of hops along the virtual-circuit, the traffic along the virtual circuit, and the processing overhead in the link layer. Thus, in a high-speed, low-error rate, optical-fiber network, the end-to-end error-recovery scheme can achieve shorter average end-to-end packet delay