Reservoir-based ABR Servive in ATM Networks

ATM technology tends to be the major networking technology for the Broadband- ISDN. Motivated by the growing amount of Internet traffic, which will be carried over ATM networks, we extend the reservoir-based resource management proposed in [ULR95] to ATM networks, where it can be used to provide an available bit rate (ABR) bearer service. ABR is connection-oriented and performs a variable bit rate data transport without timing constraints. The reservoir-based ABR scheme (ResABR) proposed in this paper assigns bandwidth on demand of the sources, taking into account the network utilization at the request time. The basic idea of ResABR is to divide virtual paths into two logical parts. One part contains the bandwidth necessary to guarantee a minimum bandwidth for all connections. Another part of each VP provides a reservoir of extra bandwidth, which can be used by one or more of the ResABR connections for a short time to send bursts. The advantages of the ResABR scheme are: resource management actions are necessary only when a burst occurs; no extra storage of cells inside the network is necessary; the scheme is robust and it provides less computational effort; it is fair between sources.

ICSI Technical Report TR-96-024

Technical Report