A HEURISTIC APPROACH FOR PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF ATM SYSTEMS

For the design and control of ATM systems, it is impor tan t to have a performance model which produces reasonably accurate results over a wide range of parameters, since one major feature of ATM is t h a t it can support many kinds of bursty t raf f ic which have different communicat ion speeds and t i m e variations. We consider in th is paper a heuristic approach which is based o n the f lu id approximation. In order t o remove the possible inaccuracy of the f lu id approximat ion in light t o moderate traffic, we propose a G/D / l adjustment. T h e performance analysis predicts the buffer content and packet delay distributions which usually have stringent requirements. A n inf in i te buffer is assumed i n the analysis. However for ATM networks, where the buffer overflow probabil ity is small, the inf in i te buffer model well approximates the f in i te buffer case. A number o f numerical examples show tha t th is heuristic approach is very accurate over a wide range of system parameters. 1