Performance evaluation of a multimedia local ATM network (MLAN) protocol

The authors present the performance evaluation of a multimedia local ATM network (MLAN) protocol for a bidirectional broadcast bus system topology, which was designed earlier and presented in MILCOM ´92. The main feature of the MLAN protocol is its ability to handle multiclass, multirate and multigrade traffic efficiently. A new polling inactive customer only (PICO) reservation technique used in this protocol exploits the characteristics of multimedia traffic to minimize the overhead due to the channel access process, which could be zero when all the terminals on the bus are active. The MLAN protocol performance has been determined by computer simulation using a multimedia traffic model. The traffic model contained four classes of traffic, each class with multiple rates and/or bursty arrivals. Throughput of 94, 91 and 88 were obtained for one composition of traffic for bus lengths of 1, 2 and 3 Km, respectively, at bus speed of 150 Mbps. Based on these results, the protocol is seen to be well suited for a multimedia ATM LAN at 50 to 150 Mbps signal rates and 1-3 Km bus lengths