PERFORMANCE STUDY OF BINARY CONGESTION CONTROL SCHEMES FOR ATM LANs THROUGH SIMULATION

Abstract

The introduction of the asynchronous transfer rnode(ATM) is currently • being propelled by the need for fast data communications in public and private networks. ATM is the switching and multiplexing technique employed for B-ISDN. The ability of ATM technology to handle multimedia traffic justifies its introduction into the local area. The LAN traffic is connectionless and delay insensitive. Data are transmitted without a prior connection establishment, and user traffic characteristics are not specified. The main characteristics of this type of traffic known as best- effort traffic is that it is bursty and unpredictable. In order to support an efficient statistical sharing of bandwidth among competing users, a congestion control mechanism is required. The technique to be employed for congestion control of this traffic remains an important issue. This thesis aims to study the benefits gained by using reactive congestion control scheme for ATM LANs. The performance of two reactive control schemes referred to as binary control schemes has been studied and compared in this dissertation through simulation. Simulation results show that a significant reduction in cell-loss probability can be achieved, and the statistical gain can be increased by the binary congestion control schemes over a wide rage of the amount of offered traffic.