Modeling and simulation of mixed traffic on a prioritized shared medium

Abstract

Network access systems (NAS) such as digital loop carriers (DLC) are increasingly utilizing a shared medium, such as Hybrid Fiber Coax (HFC) to provide point-to-multi-point access from the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to the end user (consumer). New services, such as direct access to the packet switched network (PSN, WWW) have been added to DLC equipment in such a way as to provide for a prioritized set of services over a shared medium in an effort to take advantage of otherwise unused bandwidth. The introduction of such services requires the modeling and analysis of these network access systems. This becomes complex when considering the variability in different service type traffic characteristics. This work identifies a traffic engineering problem of prioritized circuit switched and packet switched (PSTN/PSN) traffic over the same shared medium as it may relate to ''perceived'' quality of service (QoS).

A unified load generator based on formal load specification and load transformation

“…Multiplexer: Communication systems typically support several single traffic sources to be transmitted over a single medium [11]. The superposition of several single traffic sources could be treated as a load transformation process, through which the characteristics of loads over a network would be strongly influenced.…”