Performance study of a high performance information/control frame multiplexer

The performance of a control (CNTR) and information (INF) frame multiplexer which intermixes control and information traffic by accommodating the relatively short CNTR frames between two consecutive INF frames is investigated. It is shown that the delay performance of one class can be improved at the price of degrading the performance of the other. The delay performance of a transaction between two nodes of the communication subsystem can be improved by selecting the parameters of this multiplexer appropriately. The relative importance of CNTR and INF frame delays for a transaction is determined. The results of a simulation study give insight into the behavior of this multiplexer. Based on these results, it is concluded that if the control traffic intensity is high, or the relative importance of control delay is high, then larger values of gap length improve the performance.