Smart buffer management in ATM switching

Allocation of buffer capacity for different data streams, especially, in multimedia applications has turned out to be a difficult problem to solve. Static buffer allocation is the traditional way to implement buffering, but the bursty nature of multimedia traffic requires more advanced allocation solutions. When considering that a multimedia stream is usually composed of several substreams, each having different traffic characteristics and QoS measures, buffer space should be allocated dynamically. In this paper, we study both static and dynamic buffer management schemes by carrying out measurement with two Fore's ATM switches: one of them implementing a static and the other a dynamic allocation scheme