Admission control for transmitting connectionless traffic across ATM networks

The interconnection of LAN/MANs to ATM networks is important for supporting connectionless (CL) applications geographically. Given that conventional flow control mechanisms have been eliminated to improve switching speeds, admission control will be crucial for an ATM network to protect itself from congestion. Since ATM networks are connection-oriented (CO) by nature, current admission control schemes ape typically connection-based and support only CO applications. Currently proposed approaches to ATM connectionless support are either inefficient in the use of bandwidth or unable to prevent CL traffic from blocking CO traffic. This paper proposes a novel admission control scheme for CL traffic support in ATM networks. The basis of this scheme is a bandwidth computation technique that establishes a direct association between the number of users of a CL application and the minimum, amount of bandwidth required under the constraint of congestion control. The scheme provides desirable performance bounds for all supported CL applications, and at the same time, allows a higher bandwidth utilization and prevents CL traffic from blocking CO traffic