Performance comparison of error control schemes in high speed computer communication networks

An examination is made of the performance of two different approaches for handling the loss and/or corruption of messages as they are transmitted between two end users in a high-speed network. In the link-by-link approach, two adjacent nodes in an end-to-end path locally detect and recover from message loss or corruption along their joining link. In the end-to-end approach, recovery is done solely on the basis of a single end-to-end protocol. The authors develop analytic performance models for comparing the performance of these two approaches; these analytic models are validated by simulation. The models explicitly consider the effects of channel errors, propagation delays of messages and their acknowledgments, both separate and shared VC buffer pools, finite buffer capacities, buffering of unacknowledged messages, and timeout mechanisms. It is found that for the range of network parameters of practical interest, an end-to-end approach toward error control is superior to a link-by-link approach, while requiring fewer network resources.<>