Analysis of flow enforcement algorithm for bursty traffic in ATM networks

The authors analyze the flow enforcement algorithm suitable for regulating the flow of the bursty traffic in asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks (for broadband packet switching). The flow enforcement algorithm has two objectives: to force the input traffic to conform to the traffic parameters which are specified by the source itself at its connection time; and to obtain greater performance gain at the cell multiplexer by regulating the flow to some extent. The authors reveal the tradeoff relationship between the regulation level of the cell flow and the improvement of the link performance. The authors first analyze the flow enforcement mechanism to derive the delay distribution and the interdeparture time distribution for cells at the flow enforcer. For the input traffic, they allow the general independent arrivals of cells to represent the traffic burstiness larger than a Poisson distribution. The obtained interdeparture time distributions from the flow enforcer are then used to approximately analyze the performance of the cell multiplexer. For this purpose, a Markov-modulated Poisson process (MMPP) approximation method is extended to investigate the performance of individual traffic stream in the superposed arriving traffic streams