An enhanced timed-round-robin traffic control scheme for ATM networks

ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) aims at providing both guaranteed bandwidth to support real-time communications and dynamic bandwidth sharing to accommodate bursty data traffic. Achievement of this goal is vital to make ATM an enabling technology for the future integrated digital networks. This paper presents a traffic control scheme which uses a timed-round-robin cell transmission scheduling algorithm enhanced with a simple feedback flow control mechanism to realize the promised advantages of ATM networks. Specifically, with the proposed scheme, a network is able to provide each user with (1) a guaranteed bandwidth, (2) immediate access to the full link bandwidth when there is no contention from other users, and (3) freedom from cell losses. An ATM switch design is also presented which shows the feasibility of implementing the proposed scheme with today´s switch architectures