Traffic Analysis and Simulation of a Prioritized Shared Medium

Abstract

This work studies the delay effects resulting from heterogeneous traffic types competing for communications resources on a prioritized shared medium using a fixed access and admission control scheme. This research focuses on a specific class of hybrid fiber coaxial residential Internet access system. Such systems have three separate traffic classes: voice, modem, and high-speed data. The authors use analysis, modeling, and simulation to understand how the combination of these three traffic classes, all competing for finite and prioritized bandwidth resources, affects the “perceived” quality of service by the end user. The authors develop analytic models for the various traffic types being considered and validate the individual models using simulation. They show that traditional modeling techniques are not able to effectively capture the behavior of such real-world systems, and they demonstrate that their techniques are quite useful for gaining insight into the behavior and performance of these systems.