Improving the performance of broadband Internet services using layer-3 ATM switches

As the growth of applications and services over the Internet keeps increasing, the deployment of layer-3 switching using ATM approach in wide area broadband Internet backbones has been a major solution to meet the traffic demand. Although the performance degradation for TCP/IP over ATM during congestion can be reduced if switch buffer management techniques such as early packet discarding (EPD) and partial packet discarding (PPD) scheme are employed, the improvement are often not significant. We introduce the use of an ACK spacing scheme to further improved the performance of TCP/IP over ATM WANs. The simulation shows that ACK spacing is dominant in the improvement, comparing with the EPD or PPD