Priority-based dynamic access policies to WAN from LAN/MAN

The authors consider the integration problem of LAN/MAN traffic to WAN by ATM/SONET multiplexing. They propose separate buffers for voice and data to efficiently control the throughput of each traffic type. Transmission bandwidth is dynamically and adaptively shared between voice and data to guarantee grade of service (GOS) requirements for each traffic type. The authors propose two algorithms for access policies; the (N₁,N₂) scheme and its adaptive variation. Their algorithms do not require the knowledge of arrival statistics. In the fact scheme, they can play with the tradeoff between delay and cell loss probability of each traffic type. In the second scheme, for most of the time and under normal network conditions, voice traffic has higher priority. Data traffic has higher priority when the number of data cells queued reaches a certain threshold. They show how the network performance is affected by several system parameters