Performance comparison of error control schemes in high-speed computer communication networks

Abstract

The authors examine the performance of two different approaches for handling the loss and/or corruption of messages as they are transmitted between two end users in a high-speed network. In the link-by-link approach, two adjacent nodes in an end-to-end path locally detect and recover from message loss or corruption along their joining link. In the end-to-end approach, recovery is done solely on the basis of a single end-to-end protocol. The authors develop analytic performance models, validated with simulation, for comparing the performance of these two approaches. The authors find that for the range of network parameters of practical interest, an end-to-end approach towards error control is superior to a link-by-link approach, even under assumptions that would overly favor the link-by-link approach, while at the same time requiring fewer network resources (e.g. buffers, computation time) than the link-by-link approach. The performance differences arise primarily from the increased buffer requirements of the link-by-link approach.