Real-time support of continuous and variable bit rate traffic on an ATM network

There is growing interest in using switched network technology such as asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) to support both continuous bit rate multimedia data and variable bit rate burst traffic for distributed computing. Most previous work and studies have focused only on the real-time support imposed by the isochronous requirements of the video or audio sources. This paper reports the results of our early study on how ATM can support real-time and prioritized traffic. We describe some basic approaches in handling real-time quality of service parameters within the context of ATM, and observe from simulation experiments that simple priority-based scheduling approaches at the virtual circuit level provides improvement in the deadline guarantee for all real-time traffic, especially the burst traffic. We believe that additional techniques such as deadline-based scheduling will be necessary to provide better real-time support