Congestion control in an ATM LAN

Abstract

Although originally developed as a standard intended for wide area broadband networks, ATM is now being used in the local environment with ATM LANs appearing well in advance of long haul ATM services. In common with the wide area case, traffic control will play an important role in meeting quality of service (QoS) requirements in an ATM LAN. However, the problems of traffic management in an ATM LAN may be different from those in a wide area ATM network. This paper presents work in progress towards developing a practical solution for call admission control (CAC) in an ATM LAN. A review of congestion control in ATM with emphasis on proposed CAC methods is presented. This is followed by an analysis of the cell level traffic profile expected to be generated by the client workstations. The relevance of existing CAC methods to the local area case is discussed and our proposed initial solution is given. Finally some initial results of simulation studies to verify our solution are presented.