Performance evaluation of the North Carolina Information Highway

In this dissertation, a performance study of the North Carolina Information Highway (NCIH) is presented. Analytical models for an ATM Service Multiplexer (ATM-SMX) in the NCIH are developed by using discrete-time queueing analyses. Then, we use simulations to study the end-to-end performance of the NCIH. The main focus of this research is to study the performance of different types of traffic carried on the NCIH.;Initially, the NCIH supports Switched Multimegabit Data Service (SMDS) and Circuit Emulation Service (CES). Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG-2) video applications will be available in the near future. The performance of each application is influenced by ATM-SMXs, switching nodes, the speed of the links, and the other traffic carried on the NCIH. Since the traffic will be multiplexed onto the NCIH through an ATM-SMX, we model the ATM-SMX as a finite-buffer discrete-time single-server queueing system. We consider three different scenarios of the ATM-SMX and two different analytical approaches in this dissertation.;First, we analyze an ATM-SMX which carries N SMDS only. The queueing model used is a ;Second, we consider an ATM-SMX which carries N SMDS and one CES. The queueing model is denoted as an ;Third, we analyze an ATM-SMX which has multiple links of constant bit rate (CBR), variable bit rate (VBR), and unspecified hit rate (UBR) services as the input traffic. The multiplexer can be described as a ;In order to obtain the end-to-end performance of the NCIH, we build a simulation model by utilizing the results which we derived from the ATM-SMX model. A case study of three types of traffic propagating through three ATM switches is presented to investigate the influence of the mixed traffic on the performance of the NCIH.