Developing a cohesive traffic management strategy for ATM networks

The background and some of the rationale for the development of an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) traffic management framework to support the wide variety of services to be carried over the B-ISDN are discussed. The advantages of statistical, as opposed to deterministic, multiplexing are examined. Given the anticipated B-ISDN service characteristics, two classes of quality of service are defined based on cell delay and cell loss. The key ATM traffic management tools are reviewed. These tools are broadly classified as either preventive, limiting the total amount of traffic admitted to the network in order to virtually eliminate probability of cell-level congestion, or reactive, assisting the network and individual connections to avoid the onset of congestion and minimize its severity when it does occur. A strategy for the initial introduction and the long-term evolution of an ATM traffic management framework is described.<>