| Emphasis has been given recently to communication facilities capable of handling both Line Switched traffic, consisting of long messages requiring synchronous transmission, and Packet Switched traffic, consisting of data packets bursty in nature. The problem of efficiently allocating the bandwidth of a trunk to both types of traffic is handled in this Thesis for various system and traffic models. A performance analysis is carried out both for variable and fixed frame schemes.;An optimization study on the fixed frame schemes follows. The problem of dynamically allocating the fixed frame to both types of traffic is formulated as a Markovian Decision process. It is shown that the movable boundary scheme, suggested for commercial implementations of integrated multiplexors, offers optimal or near optimal performance and simplicity of implementation.;Finally, the behavior of the movable boundary integrated scheme is studied for tandem link connections. The line-switched signalling procedure, based on the Common-Channel-Interswitch-Signalling protocol, is modelled and analyzed. Under the assumptions made for the line-switched traffic, the forward allocation technique is found to offer the best alternative among different path set-up strategies.;It is shown that variable frame schemes, adjusting the frame length according to the traffic variations, offer better trunk utilization at the cost of the additional hardware and software complexity needed because of the lack of synchronization. |
