A comparative study of switching schemes in isotropic networks

The authors present a comparative study of two switching schemes for isotropic networks, namely, single-hop and cut-through communication schemes. The comparison between the two is based on the time delay for a packet to go through a given path, characterized by the number of links between source and destination. Each scheme is modeled by a discrete Markov chain. The research results show how the performance of the communication schemes depends on the path length, the load on the communication network, and the error rate. The cut-through communication scheme is considerably better than the single-hop communication scheme when the communication load is light. However, as the load increases, the performance of the cut-through scheme deteriorates more rapidly than the single hop, until they are comparable. When the load is very heavy, the two performance curves actually cross very close to 1-3 p, so the single-hop communication scheme works better. The error rate plays a crucial role in the communication process. The time delay becomes infinite when the throughput approaches 1-p. Simple formulas are presented for the analysis.<>