Response Time Performance of Videotex Systems

Videotex is an interactive information system which provides a variety of services to its users. Examples of such services are information retrieval, software distribution, transaction processing, and message handling. An important aspect of the quality of service experienced by a videotex user is the response time. We consider the use of mixed individual/broadcast delivery to enhance the response time performance. Broadcast delivery is attractive for information retrieval applications where several users may be requesting the same information page, and a single broadcast of this page will satisfy all requests simultaneously. Individual response, however, is required for transaction-oriented services and for the retrieval of confidential information. A queueing model is developed to study the performance of videotex systems under mixed delivery. Analytic results are derived for the mean response time. Numerical examples are presented to show the performance characteristics of mixed delivery, and how it can be used to enhance the response time performance without increasing the processing capacity of the system.