Performance Evaluation of Multireject, Selective Reject, and Other Protocol Enhancements

This study compared the effects on performance of four features of the LAPB and LAPD protocols. LAPB is the link level for the X.25 protocol, and LAPD is the link level for the ISDN "D" signaling channel. The features were: multireject in which additional reject or selective reject frames can be retransmitted under certain conditions, selective reject in which an entity can request selected frames to be retransmitted, the null information frame (NIF) with which additional control frames are sent to help detect missing frames, and multiple service access points (SAP\´s) in which several link-level protocol handlers are multiplexed on the same physical link (a feature unique to LAPD). Results indicate that the current standard LAPB/D protocol with multireject is the preferred protocol. Selective reject generally performed worse than the standard protocol, and offered improvement only with complex and expensive enhancements. The NIF feature yielded a virtually unnoticeable performance improvement. Multi-SAP introduced a virtually unnoticeable impairment when it was used to carry the same traffic load as a single SAP.