Abstract

Plaintree Systems Inc. commissioned The Tolly Group to benchmark the performance of its WaveSwitch 4800 8-port FDDI Switch. Maximum forwarding rates were determined for single stream as well as four-stream throughput. The Tolly Group also verified that the product’s buffering scheme is resistant to head-of-line blocking. 

In tests of single-stream frame throughput, the WaveSwitch 4800 achieved frame for- warding rates in excess of 99% of FDDI’s theoretical maximum while forwarding frames of 1,024 bytes and larger. Forwarding 64-byte frames, the WaveSwitch forwarded packets at a rate of 148,800 per second, which is exactly 10 times the maximum frame rate for 10 Mbit/s Ethernet, and more than 89% of the theoretical maximum FDDI frame rate of 166,667 frames per second (fps) (see figure 1). Expressed in Mbit/s, throughput at 64-byte frames was 76.19 Mbit/s (89.28% of theoretical maximum), at 512-byte frames was 96.87 Mbit/s (98.32%), at 1,024-byte frames was 98.06 Mbit/s (99.11%), at 2,048-byte frames was 98.93 Mbit/s (99.45%), and at 4,096-byte frames 99.29 Mbit/s (99.55%).