Analysis of Group 4 Facsimile Throughput

The CCITT (Consultive Committee for International Telephone and Telegraph) is developing recommendations for a new generation of facsimile equipment which is designed as Group 4. This class of equipment will transmit an ISO A4-sized page overcommunications networks having error control. Most commercial packet switched and circuit data networks have been designed primarily for the communications of short bursty messages (typically 1000-2000 bits/message between computers and data terminals. The length of a G4 message is forecast to be very long-typically 500 000 bits. There is serious concern that data networks may not handle facsimile traffic very efficiently. This paper projects the near term characteristics of data networks and Group 4 facsimile systems, and estimates the efficiency with which Group 4 messages will be transmitted over three types of data networkspacket switching (PSDN), circuit switched (CSDN), and the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Throughput has been measured by the amount of time required to send a single facsimile page of 500 000 coded bits. In all cases the overhead, as a percentage of the basic facsimile transmission time, is in the range of 50-60 percent. For each network there is a different factor is the halts are forced is transmission as a result of the network window. For the CSDN, the process if converting from voice to data mode is the dominating factor. For the PSTN, packet retransmission due to transmission errors is the dominating factor. The paper includes the assumptions and some of the analytical details of the throughput analysis. Conclusions are drawn regarding the relative transmission efficints through the three types of networks.