Queueing Disciplines and Passive Congestion Control in Byte- Stream Networks.

This paper deals with queueing disciplines for a class of wide- area virtual-circuit data networks. Messages on each virtual circuit are transmitted logically as streams of bytes. A small number of successive bytes are collected into a packet and provided with an address header. Packets from different virtual circuits are intermingled on trunks and are relayed from one node of the network to another, while protocol processing and flow control are handled at the network edges. We compare the performance of first-in-first-out and round-robin packet service disciplines at the trunk nodes. In addition, priority service may be given to single-packet messages. We survey the delay and through put characteristics of the different disciplines as a function of traffic mix, packet size, traffic intensity, and the ratio of trunk speed to access line speed.