ATM cell delay and loss for best-effort TCP in the presence of isochronous traffic

The paper reports the findings of a simulation studying the queueing behavior of “best-effort” traffic in the presence of constant-bit-rate (CBR) and variable bit-rate (VBR) isochronous traffic. In the study, best-effort traffic refers to ATM cells that support communication between host end systems executing various applications and exchanging information using TCP/IP. The performance measures considered are TCP cell loss, TCP packet loss, mean cell queueing delay, and mean cell queue length. The simulation results show that, under certain conditions, best-effort TCP traffic may experience as much as 2% cell loss. The results also show that the probability of cell and packet loss decreases logarithmically with increased buffer size