Flow-aware gateway support for IP-over-ATM

Multi-service ATM networks will be deployed in internetwork environment to relay IP traffic, including elastic packet flows generated by adaptive network applications. In light of this advance, we devise flow-aware traffic management framework for the better-than-best-effort support of long-duration adaptive IP flows over ATM. It requires the applications and the ATM gateways to periodically exchange hints indicating up-to-dated flow information. This two-way explicit indication mechanism facilitates improved interactions between applications and the network, and increased coordination between end-to-end and link-level traffic control. Network hints help an application to adapt and avoid congestion, while application hints enable an ATM gateway to selectively aggregate and map packet flows into ATM VCs, to regulate CBR bandwidth, and to interoperate with ABR rate-based flow control. Via simulation and experimentation, we demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of this framework in balancing application performance and bandwidth efficiency in the use of CBR VCs, and in improving ATM link utilization and avoiding gateway congestion in the use of ABR VCs