Study of a packet average path length and average speed of delivery in data network traffic model

We study the effects of network connection topology and routing on packet's average path length and average delivery speed in a packet switching network model of the OSI network layer. After describing the model we present the study of how average path length and average speed of delivery of packets are affected by network size, network connection topology and routing algorithms. We investigate how these performance indicators are affected by addition of extra links to various types of network connection topologies. We consider various preferentiality levels of attachment of the extra links and static versus adoptive routing algorithms with various types of routing cost metrics.