A Study of Line Overhead in the Arpanet

Abstract

The form, extent, and effect of the communication line overhead in the ARPANET are considered. The source of this overhead is separated into various levels of protocol hierarchy and the characteristics of each level are summarized. Then the line efficiency for various models of system use is studied. Some measurements of line efficiency for the ARPANET are presented and by extrapolation these measurements are used to anticipate overhead in a heavily loaded network. Similar results are derived for a recently proposed network protocol and compared with those for the current system. © 1976, ACM. All rights reserved.