Packet loss performance of selective cell discard schemes in ATM switches

In transport-layer protocols such as TCP over ATM networks, a packet is discarded when one or more cells of that packet are lost, and the destination node then requires its source to retransmit the corrupted packet. Therefore, once one of the cells constituting a packet is lost, its subsequent cells of the corrupted packet waste network resources. Thus, discarding those cells will enable us to efficiently utilize network resources, and will improve the packet loss probability. We focus on tail dropping (TD) and early packet discard (EPD) as selective cell discard schemes which enforce the switches to discard some of the arriving cells instead of relaying them. We exactly analyze the packet loss probability in a system applying these schemes. Their advantages and limits are then discussed based on numerical results derived through the analysis