Evaluation of New Dynamic Time Division Multiplexing Protocol for Real-Time Traffic over Converged Networks

Packet switched networks have been increasingly used for the transmission of real-time traffic in addition to the traditional best-effort. Although not primarily designed for time critical traffic, industries like professional audio and video, electrical utilities and automation systems, motivated the need for having converged networks that support both time critical as well as best-effort traffic. In this paper a new proposed dynamic Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) protocol, Flexilink, is evaluated for its ability to provide a low latency unified network infrastructure for both real-time traffic as well as traditional best-effort traffic. A simulation model had been developed to evaluate Flexilink performance, however, no research evaluation had been done based on hardware implementation of the protocol. We present a test-bed based study and evaluation for the performance of Flexilink. Test-bed results shows that Flexilink has a better performance compared to other multimedia networking solutions mainly in providing extremely low end-to-end latency and jitter that is well below the audible threshold which makes Flexilink suitable to be used in live multimedia networks.