Early packet discard with diverse management policies for EOM cells

Previous papers (Floyd and Romanov 1994; Turner 1996; Casoni and Turner 1997) have described the early packet discard technique for maintaining packet integrity during overload in ATM switches and evaluated the performance without properly discussing the role of end-of-message (EOM) cells in transmitted packets. In this paper the performance, in terms of fraction of the link´s capacity used to carry complete packets, is evaluated considering different ways to manage the last cells of AAL5 packets. This is shown to be important for the end receiver and to require one extra control bit both to be able to cope with the problem of merged packets and to have good performance