Internetworking using interframe source correlation

A new packet forwarding scheme for (LAN) internetworking devices is proposed to take advantage of temporal locality in the network traffic. This scheme exploits the correlated nature of frame arrivals and makes forwarding decisions based on the time gap between arriving and departing frames. A theoretical model is developed for expressing the temporal locality in the network traffic. A queueing network model is developed for a medium access control (MAC) layer bridge implementation of the proposed scheme. A performance comparison is made between the proposed and conventional schemes using average throughput and average transfer delay as overall performance measures. Poisson arrivals are used to establish a lower bound on the performance improvement between the two schemes. The theoretical and simulation model results are in agreement over the region of operational interest