The Impact of Fixed-size Frame on Bandwidth Utility Ratio

In computer communication network, the term frame is used widely (e.g. the basic unit in the highspeed switch fabric or media access control layer), which may be of variable size or of fixed-size. We focus on the fixed-size frame because of its advantages for real-time data. Since user information couldn´t be exactly the multiple of the frame size, part of bandwidth resource will be lost. In this paper, we formulate this problem as a bin packing problem, and investigate how to define the size of fixed frame in order to utilize the bandwidth resource efficiently. Consider the protocol overhead, we find that the average performance is worst when the frame-size is double of the protocol overhead. Furthermore, we obtain the closed-form expression for some range of the frame length