Performance analysis of A/I NET switch

The exponential growth of the Internet makes Internet Protocol (IP) a dominant network protocol, but the increasing demand of Internet traffic has caused the traditional routers become overloaded. Since Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and other new cell switching technologies can route very fast and operate at Gigabit/s rate, the use of ATM as the backbone network for carrying IP traffic becomes an appealing choice. However, IP traffic over plain ATM network has been found to be with low throughput [l0], mainly due to the fragmentation of IP packet. Therefore, two strategies, Partial Packet Discarding Scheme (PPD) and Early Packet Discarding Scheme (EPD), are introduced to apply on the switch to improve the performance. In this thesis, we investigate and evaluate a new approach, A/I NET. A/I NET characterise itself as a network that integrates ATM and IP well. One of the worth-mentioned features of A/I NET is the non-interleaving routing property of IP cells. This means it requires many routes to be mapped to the same virtual circuit (VC) label, thereby providing a scalable mapping method. However, non-interleaving routing affects other performance issues, such as buffer requirement and effective throughput. By performing computer simulation on PPD, EPD and A/I NET, this thesis investigates the performance impact of non-interleaving IP traffic on A/I NET