Performance analysis of fast reservation protocol in ATM networks with arbitrary topologies

One of the main features of ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) is that the transmission rate can be adjusted according to the degree of network congestion. FRP (Fast Reservation Protocol) is a recently proposed protocol which can utilize this unique feature of ATM technology in such a way that the amount of bandwidth a source requests is reduced if an attempt to reserve bandwidth is rejected by the network. A rationale behind this is that the rejection of the bandwidth request indicates network congestion. Therefore, requests for smaller amounts of bandwidth after reservation failures enable sources to share network resources efficiently. To evaluate burst (a protocol data unit of FRP) level performance of FRP, this paper provides an approximate analysis of FRP-based ATM networks with arbitrary topologies. Its mathematical model is considered as a loss network with retrials, which allows that the amount of bandwidth requested by retrial bursts is reduced and that bursts may have alternative routes. Through numerical results, the appropriate bandwidth reservation method and routing strategy are studied in depth.