Ring-based broadband customer access network with a flexible multicasting capability and its performance analysis

Contrary to telephony networks where point-to-point voice traffic is prevalent, a future B-ISDN is expected to support increasing multicast and broadcast applications. For the successful deployment of the B-ISDN, a customer access network must have flexible multicast and broadcast capabilities in addition to a high speed data transfer capability. The paper proposes flexible multicast and broadcast mechanisms for B-NT (broadband network terminator) which will be used as a broadband customer access network. After briefly describing the dual ring based architecture of B-NT, the authors present novel multicast and broadcast schemes of B-NT which can utilize the bandwidth of a ring efficiently. Using an analytic model developed for the evaluation of B-NT, they investigate the performance of B-NT with an asymmetric traffic pattern as well as with a symmetric traffic pattern. The performance results indicate that the multicast schemes can significantly increase the throughput of the ring-based customer access network.