Virtual queueing techniques for UBR+ service in ATM with fair access and minimum bandwidth guarantee

The ATM Forum is currently discussing the need for a new best-effort service called UBR+, which is an enhancement to the existing UBR service, to support data traffic. The objective of the UBR+ service is to provide each user with a minimum service rate guarantee and a fair access to any excess available bandwidth. In this paper, the authors present a new efficient scheme for supporting this service. The key advantage of the scheme is that it employs only FIFO queueing (instead of per-VC queueing) and admits simple implementation in ATM switches. The ideas involve a simple scheduling mechanism that is based on per-VC queueing and incorporate the virtual queueing technique that can efficiently emulate per-VC queueing on a shared FIFO queue. Simulation results are presented to show that the schemes can deliver almost ideal performance for supporting the new service requirements of UBR+