An experimental study of VBR video over various ATM switch architectures

One of the most important components of an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) network is the switch. Switch design is not a part of the ATM standards so vendors use a wide variety of techniques to build their switches. In this paper, the authors present experimental results of switching and multiplexing real-time Variable Bit Rate (VBR) video traffic (JPEG, MPEG-1, and MPEG-2) through two different ATM switch architectures. Real-time VBR traffic, such as digital video, is particularly interesting due to its high demands in terms of bandwidth, real-time delivery and processing requirements. The experiments show that the fastest switches, i.e., lowest latencies, do not necessarily perform better when transmitting VBR video. The impact of the high speed network components; characteristics, such as switch fabric architecture, buffering strategies, and higher layer transport protocols (i.e., UDP, TCP/IP), are illustrated through the experimental results