Response Time in a Teletext System: An Individual User's Perspective

Teletext is a one-way, broadcast-delivery information system. Pages of information are continuously broadcast to the users. User terminals monitor the broadcast stream and requested pages, once recognized, are captured and stored. Teletext systems possess many attractive features. Among them are simplicity of operation and insensitivity of system performance to user loads. Previous research has considered the issue of response time optimization in teletext systems. In those studies, response time was averaged over the entire user population. In this paper, we analyze an individual user's response time experience. Needless to say, this provides a better gauge of the quality of service being delivered. In addition, this perspective provides the appropriate framework for evaluating strategies that take advantage of user terminal storage capabilities to improve response time performance. To demonstrate this, one such strategy is developed and analyzed. Numerical examples that illustrate the use of the paper's results are also presented.