Traffic dispersion and its impact on ATM protocol functions

Traffic dispersion, which means spreading traffic from a source over multiple disjoint paths through a network, has gained interest for the handling of bursty multimedia traffic. The strategy has been shown to improve network performance and to increase security and tolerance to faults. Our study focuses on the implementation of the technique in an ATM network, and discusses the protocol functions and signalling procedures necessary to support traffic dispersion. These include connection establishment and release for multiple paths, and the dispersion of cells at the sender with resequencing at the receiver. There are also simulation results included to show how dispersion affects the delay a cell suffers through a network. Lastly, we give an example of pseudocode for implementing resequencing and decoding of dispersed cells in a receiving AAL.