Peak rate enforcement in ATM networks

The authors address peak rate enforcement in asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks by pick-up policing mechanisms. Since the network cannot rely on user´s compliance when declaring his traffic parameters, the policing function has been introduced to monitor the traffic characteristics of any connection. Policing mechanisms proposed in the literature are actually pick-up mechanisms since cells can pass transparently through unless a policing action was performed according to some counting process. The authors analyze the impact of the cell multiplexing jitter on policing mechanism dimensioning. Recognizing that dimensioning is a critical point for such mechanisms. It is shown that network buffer overflow cannot be avoided in certain conditions. Therefore, a new policing scheme, called cell spacing, is introduced, and two spacing algorithms are presented