Performance study of buffering within switches in local area networks

Abstract: Today's demanding applications, such as multimedia, require higher network transfer rates. Traditional local area networks (LANs) will not be able to provide the throughput required by these applications. The use of switches in LANs is an effective technique to increase the throughput of the network. These switches have finite buffers at their input and output ports. The size of these buffers affect the packet loss rate. It also affect the delay at the switch as packets may have to wait for the output buffer to become available. We study the effect of buffer sizes within these switches. We show how the buffer size is related to the performance of the switch as well as overall performance of the LAN.