MULTIMEDIA TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES FOR GUARANTEED ATM NETWORK PERFORMANCE

A broadband multimedia network, such as broadband ISDN (B-ISDN), will be required to carry the traffic generated by a wide range of services. These services will have very diverse traffic flow characteristics and performance requirements. The asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) is a fixed-length packet transport scheme which can potentially carry this heterogeneous mix of traffic in an integrated and efficient manner by statistically multiplexing bursty traffic flows at the expense of buffering delay and loss. It is critical for the integrity of many multimedia service types that guaranteed performance levels be provided by the transport network through effective and fair traffic control. This paper presents a framework for the specification of ATM performance requirements, and develops several high-level design principles for performance-driven ATM traffic controls based on resource reservation. Simulation results illustrate that to satisfy these performance guarantees, bursty traffic should be statistically multiplexed only if connection peak rates are low relative to the network link speed, or burst durations are short. A pragmatic traffic management approach is stressed which favors simplicity and robustness in the traffic control design rather than optimizing bandwidth efficiency. © 1990 IEEE