Performance Evaluation of a Traffic Control Mechanism for ATM Networks

Future ATM networks will be required to support a plethora of services, transaction types and cell sequence behaviors with performance guarantees. Before this goal can be realized, however, some basically problems related to bandwidth allocation and traffic control in the ATM layer must be resolve. Such problems will in all likelihood defy solution as long as they studied in isolation without a unifying traffic characterization and traffic control framework. This work presented in this paper is part of an ongoing effort directed at the development of an integrated traffic characterization and control infrastructure for ATM networks. In this paper a traffic control mechanism capable of monitoring and controlling a rich family of incoming traffic behaviors is introduced. The family of support traffic behaviors is clearly characterized. Some possible roles for the traffic control mechanism in a traffic control infrastructure are presented along with its detailed performance analysis. Finally, some new results on the stochastic behavior of a bursty source are presented