Performance Evaluation of a New Flexible Time Division Multiplexing Protocol on Mixed Traffic Types

The broadcasting industry has recently begun to adopt statistical multiplexing based network platform in their workflow to support professional live audio/video (AV) transmission instead of the Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) based system. These audio-over-packet switched systems require a carefully designed and managed network to ensure key quality measures of the real-time (RT) media, such as low jitter and low latency. Often the best effort traffic or different types of media are still physically or logically segregated from these dedicated systems, or require large redundant links. The proposed Flexilink architecture is an alternative that combines both circuit switched and best effort features. However, there is no research evaluation that shows the actual performance of this proposed architecture. In this paper, we give a simulation based study and critical evaluation of the performance of the Flexilink network. The simulation results show that Flexilink has a better and more stable RT performance when compared with both Ethernet and priority queueing networks, especially when given a burst of traffic and/or multiple RT traffic sources. In addition, Unlike other networking protocols, jitter in Flexilink is below the audible threshold.