An Algebraic Model for Evaluating the Performance of an ATM Switch with Explicit Rate Marking

Stochastically timed process algebras are emerging as a promising formalism to support performance modeling and evaluation of concurrent and distributed systems. To become well accepted, such formalisms have to be proved to be able to provide readable, modular, scalable formal descriptions of more and more complex systems which can be automatically analyzed with a reasonable computational effort. To this aim, we present an algebraic model of an ATM switch which supports the four service categories defined by the ATM Forum and implements explicit rate marking for ABR traffic, backward explicit congestion notification, and connection admission control. As performance measures of interest, we assess via simulation the cell loss ratio, the mean queue length, and the link utilization for the outgoing link in several different configurations