PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF ABR SWITCH MECHANISMS

Abstract

The ATM Forum has defined a new service class for data applications called Available Bit Rate (ABR) service. Considerable protocol development efforts in recent ATM Forum activities have been centered on the traffic management of ABR service. The goal is to efficiently manage the left over network bandwidth and fairly distribute it among contending ABR Virtual Connections so that communication links can be optimally utilized. A rate-based flow control mechanism has been adopted for that purpose. The objective of this congestion control mechanism is to maximize throughput and minimize delays and losses incurred at intermediate bottleneck network nodes. In this dissertation various available switch mechanisms like NIST ER, ERICA, DERA have been simulated, using the NIST ATM simulator [9] and their' performance characteristics have been studied. The performance metrics used include queue length, source flow-controlled cell rate dynamics. The program is written in C language on the Pentium(300MHz) processor system under LINUX environment.