Providing performance guarantees in an FDDI network

A network subsystem supporting a continuous media file system must guarantee a minimum throughput, a maximum delay, and a maximum jitter. The authors present a transport protocol that provides these guarantees. To support different types of service, the protocol is built from modules selected to meet the requirements of each communication session. A buffering technique is used to provide jitter guarantees. To provide throughput and delay guarantees, network performance is optimized based on the required transfer rate. The effects of controlling transmission rate and packet size are presented. The resulting transport protocol is modeled on a simulated FDDI (fiber distributed data interface) network and the results are analyzed. It is shown that the protocol provides the required guarantees for the anticipated types of traffic