Performance improvement of an ATM network by introducing string mode

A new multilink concept, called string mode, is presented that can be used in an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network to balance the load and thereby increase the efficiency of the network. Performance evaluation shows an efficiency improvement of about 50% when the concept is used with bursty sources with a relatively high peak bitrate. Two different chopper algorithms are investigated, one is distributing strings in cyclic order, while the other uses a uniform random distribution. Results show that a better performance can be obtained by using cyclic distribution. However, cyclic distribution requires a counter for every source to store information about the previous selected links, while a random generator used to determine the next output link can be a shared resource for a number of sources