Effect of timeout retransmissions on end‐to‐end delay in packet switching networks

An end‐to‐end error recovery scheme is a promising way to obtain low end‐to‐end delays in packet switching networks. However, a too‐short timeout interval may cause unnecessary packet retransmissions even when a packet is transmitted successfully to the receiver. On the other hand, a longer timeout interval may introduce large end‐to‐end delay when a packet is actually lost. Thus, it becomes important to determine an appropriate timeout period in the scheme. This paper analyzes a tandem queueing network system with blocking due to finite capacity in intermediate nodes and investigates the effect of the timeout period on the end‐to‐end delay performance. It is found that there exists the timeout period minimizing the mean packet transmission delay in the end‐to‐end error recovery scheme. The delay performance between end‐to‐end and link‐by‐link error recovery schemes also is compared and it is found that the delay performances of these schemes are influenced significantly by the node‐to‐node delay.