Real-time traffic measurements on MAGNET II

Real-time traffic measurements on MAGNET II, an integrated network testbed based on asynchronous time sharing (ATS), are reported. The quality of service is evaluated by monitoring the buffer occupancy distribution, the packet time delay distribution, the packet loss, and the gap distribution of the consecutively lost packets. Experiments show that both time delay and buffer occupancy distributions of multiplexed video sources display a marked bimodal behavior, which does not seem to depend on the buffer size. The reliance of the network designer on traffic sources that do not exhibit substantial correlations can lead to implementations with serious congestion problems. For ATS-based networks with different traffic classes, the impact of a traffic class on the performance of the other classes tends to be diminished when compared with single-class-based ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) networks