Switch Mechanisms for the ABR Service: A Comparison Study

While lots of effort is done on behalf of the ATM Forum and the ITU standardisation bodies in specifying the user network interface (UNI) for ATM’s available bit rate (ABR) service the specification of the switch mechanisms will be left to the manufacturers. In this study some of the algorithms proposed for dynamically distributing the available bandwidth at the switches such as EPRCA, CAPC, the OSU scheme and a modified version of the MIT proposal are compared. In our investigations we will concentrate mainly on the fairness behaviour of the schemes, their complexity and their warm up periods. The work presented here is a description of our preliminary results. At this stage, we have mainly considered the fairness behaviour of the different schemes using a single test scenario. MOTS CLÉS : ATM; ABR; EPRCA; CAPC; MIT plan; OSU plan; Équité.