Adaptive buffer threshold updating for an ATM switch

Efficient and fair use of buffer space in ATM switches is essential to gain high throughput and low cell-loss performance from the network. A shared buffer architecture associated with threshold based virtual partition among output ports is proposed. Thresholds are updated based on traffic characteristics on each outgoing link, so as to adapt to traffic loads. System behavior under varying traffic patterns is investigated via simulation. Cell loss rate is the quality of service (QoS) measure that is used in this paper. The study shows that the threshold based adaptive buffer allocation scheme ensures fair share of the buffer space even under bursty loading conditions.