On the Relative Importance of Arrival Statistics and Output Addressing for Shared-Buffer ATM Switches

Traffic arrival processes are the important ingredients for the performance evaluation of ATM switches. Three important aspects of traffic models are the arrival pattern, output address correlation and, output address (or hot-spot) distribution. Here we investigate the relative importance of selfsimilar traffic model vs bursty traffic model, under the various conditions of output addressing, and presence of a hot-spot on the performance of the switch. Simulation results and intuitive explanations of the results are presented. Our simulation results quantify the relative importance of the two issues. Although a self-similar input does result in a higher cell loss when the cells address the outputs independently and uniformly, the effect is almost completely masked in the presence of hot-spots and output address correlation.