The authors report their performance evaluation of a design for sending stream and bursty communication traffic on a single physical network. The proposed design (derived from the IEEE 802 committee) divides network time into frames, which are divided into three portions each consisting of multiple slots. The first portion consists of reservation slots used to reserve stream bandwidth in a manner similar to reservation-Aloha. The second consists of data slots for stream traffic. The third contains data slots for burst traffic and uses slotted-Aloha style control. The exact number of slots allocated to stream traffic varies according to the number of reservation requests found in the reservation portion of the frame.

Only readers well versed in queueing theory will appreciate the analysis. The analytical model is composed of three different solutions corresponding to regions of low, medium, and high utilization of stream data. The paper compares its analytical model with data obtained by simulation and obtains some degree of agreement.

The paper references earlier works and freely uses their results. Although it is necessary to read those earlier papers to completely trust this analysis, this short paper is easily read, and it succinctly summarizes their findings. Researchers working with ISDN or multimode communication protocols will find this paper interesting.