Bandwidth quantization in the broadband ISDN

The authors indicate that the number of rates supportable in an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) broadband network has to be limited unless a network is acceptable without knowing its grade of service. The quantization of the channel bandwidth, given the traffic arrival rate as a function of requested bandwidth, is considered. Capacity sharing models in ATM networks are presented. The calculation procedure for blocking probability which will be affected by the quantization problem is described. A class of control methods that can render a product-form solution is introduced. The results indicate that there is little performance difference between a quantized channel and a continuous-rate channel as the level of quantization exceeds ten