SIMULATION COMPARISON OF BROAD-BAND NETWORKING TECHNOLOGIES

This paper describes a simulation study comparing delay and throughput performance of several access/backbone combinations of Frame Relay, A synchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), and IEEE 802.6 broadband networking t echnologies. The comparisons are made using similar Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) configurations supporting integrated traffic from voice, video, data and image sources. Results include complete distributions for network and end-end delays. These delay distributions are obtaine d for different traffic loads and different numbers of network trunks in a connection. All of the configurations are capable of providing ad equate delay performance at moderate network loads for real-time (voic e and video) traffic, but significant differences are seen in data and image delay performance.