HDLC Throughput and Response Time for Bidirectional Data Flow with Nonuniform Frame Sizes

The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate the performance of the HDLC (high-level data link control) protocol (to be more precise, we only consider the asynchronous response mode), and to suggest and analyze some possible improvements. The performance criteria are maximum throughput and response time and the flow of data is bidirectional with nonuniform frame sizes. The mathematical model of the HDLC protocol developed here allows us to compute its performance as a function of the maximum window width according to the characteristics of the traffic and taking into account the transmission delays and the overheads.