Improving Internet traffic transport over ABR backbones through bandwidth overbooking

The use of ABR service on Internet backbones has been recently proposed as a means to improve statistical multiplexing and to recover the bandwidth left over by VBR traffic. While this approach permits far better utilization of ATM resources than it is possible otherwise with the CBR service, full link utilization is seldom achieved. We address the reasons why the ABR flow control cannot track the dynamic variations on the available bandwidth along backbone links and we propose an approach to improve resource utilization that relies on bandwidth overbooking. The proposed scheme avoids cell losses and unnecessary rate reductions