Performance simulation of a token ring: users' view

Most of performance studies for local area networks (LANs) have been based upon the average transmission time of a packet (or frame) as a performance criterion. Those models have been developed for the performance measure of the low-level physical and data link layers of LANs. They predict the relative efficiency of different network topologies, transmission media, and access protocols. However, they often fail to measure an end-user's message transmission time. A realistic performance measure for end-users should attempt to measure the average transmission time of the entire user message. The authors concentrate on the performance of a token ring LAN system for a users' view. A simulator has been developed to quantitatively measure the elapsed time of an end-user's message. Simulation results show that the performance of the network with the exhaustive service (ES) strategy is much better than that of the network which works with the non-exhaustive service (NES) strategy. Also, the measure based on user messages is compared with the conventional performance measure based on packets and shows differences in performance measurement.<>