Packets Sent from the MultiNet Card

When the upper layers send a packet to the MultiNet virtual adapter, the MultiNet Protocol Driver does either of the following:

• If the adapter is active at the driver level, the packet is sent to the card for transmission.
• If the adapter is passive at the driver level, the driver buffers the packet.

The buffered packets are sent as soon as the corresponding virtual adapter is activated. The maximum queuing delay occurs when a packet arrives on a virtual adapter just after it has been inactivated. In this case, the driver waits for the entire switching cycle before it can send the packet to the card. This delay for a packet on network $i$ can be formulated as $\sum_{j\neq i}(T_j + \delta_j) + \delta_i$ , where $T_j$ is the activity period of network $j$ and $\delta_j$ is the time taken to switch to network $j$ .