Performance of burst-level bandwidth reservation in ATM LANs

The authors investigate burst-level bandwidth reservation schemes in ATM LANs and compare the performance of REQ/ACK and on-the-fly reservation schemes for a client-server model with a single ATM switch. To compare performance, they derive an analytical model for the mean burst transfer delay, blocking probability and throughput. They discuss the dependence of these performance parameters on the propagation delay-to-burst duration ratio and peak rate-to-link speed ratio. They show that, for moderate propagation delay-to-burst duration ratio, the on-the-fly scheme is more desirable since the REQ/ACK scheme has limited achievable throughput for fast reservation traffic due to unused bandwidth during the REQ-ACK cycle. Also, for a given burst length (in bits), the delay performance of REQ/ACK scheme is more sensitive to increase in the peak rate than the on-the-fly scheme