Simon Paul Davis

Resource Allocation for Packet Data Traffic on ATM: Problems and Solutions

ATM networks are supposed to transport all sorts of information covering voice and video with a wide variety of coding schemes and bandwidth requirements, and a wide spectrum of data from low-rate interactive applications through LAN/MAN interconnection up to high resolution animation graphics and graphics data base browsing. Despite many proposals made to date, some problems remain in providing a resource allocation and congestion control scheme suitable for all these services, particularly those with high peak bit rate or unpredictable burstiness.

The Fast Reservation Shaper: A Novel Approach for Fast Resource Management

Abstract Simple resource allocation procedures such as peak bitrate allocation are grossly inefficient for bursty data services. More complex techniques have to be considered if severe over-dimensioning of network resources is to be avoided. Techniques such as the Fast Reservation Protocol (FRP) offer some measure of statistical gain for little extra switch implementation cost. However, greater network efficiency can be achieved for high peak bitrate bursty data traffic, at the expensive of some delay, by combining a traffic shaping technique with dynamic resource allocation such as FRP. This paper presents a novel traffic shaping algorithm combined with a bandwidth reservation technique based on a FIFO buffer with thresholds. The algorithm is described, simulation results are presented with respect to the performance of the shaper and a comparison is made with the performance of unshaped sources.