Dimensioning concurrent packet reassembly at destination on slotted multiaccess network

When variable-length packets are sent on a slotted, multi-access network the packets must be segmented at the source and reassembled at the destination. Since each packet being received requires a reassembly resource at the destination, there is a need for multiple resources at the destination. Congestion of these resources will lead to packet loss, but the number of resources may be constrained, so that an essential part of the design for these networks is to predict the requirement for reassembly resources at the destination. The author describes an analytic model which may be used to do this and also reports simulation results which support the analysis. The analysis is based on a cyclic service queueing model which is an approximation for a distributed queue dual bus (DQDB) network, the authorised IEEE 802.6 Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) project.