Bandwidth advertising for MAN/ATM connectionless internetting

A preliminary proposal is made for a new approach to connectionless traffic handling in asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks. The approach is based on available bandwidth information on the virtual path (VP) periodically supplied by the network to the gateway (bandwidth advertising). The knowledge of available bandwidth allows the gateway to inject (with relatively low risk of cell loss) short bursts into the VP pipe immediately, without buffering or prior bandwidth renegotiation. The performance benefits of the proposed scheme with respect to more conventional schemes are evaluated in a simple network example