QUEUING ANALYSIS FOR MULTICAST PACKET-SWITCHING

The development of broadband transmission and ATM switching technologi es opens up an opportunity for providing high bit-rate multipoint and multimedia services such as video conferencing. Also, wireless communi cation has the inherent advantage of multicast transmission and may be used for multipoint information services. We consider multicast packe t switching for which an input may send the same packet to many output s within an ATM time slot. A host of multicast queueing disciplines ca n be exercised. Assuming only independent Head of Line (HOL) service t o an output from slot to slot, we derive the delay performance and sat uration throughput. We then examine the accuracy of the assumption for different disciplines via extensive simulation. The FCFS HOL service discipline not only has almost completely identical results for simula tion versus analysis, but also provides the best saturation throughput , fairness, and delay performance among all disciplines considered. Th e analysis shows that implementing packet priorities can significantly improve delay performance.