Queueing analysis for multicast packet switching

The development of broadband transmission and ATM switching technologies opens up an opportunity for providing high bit-rate multipoint and multimedia services such as video conferencing. Also, wireless communication has the inherent advantage of multicast transmission and may be used for multipoint information services. We consider multicast packet switching for which an input may send the same packet to many outputs within an ATM time slot. A host of multicast queueing disciplines can be exercised. Assuming only independent Head of Line (HOL) service to an output from slot to slot, we derive the delay performance and saturation throughput. We then examine the accuracy of the assumption for different disciplines via extensive simulation. The FCFS HOL service discipline not only has almost completely identical results for simulation versus analysis, but also provides the best saturation throughput, fairness, and delay performance among all disciplines considered. The analysis shows that implementing packet priorities can significantly improve delay performance.