Guaranteed frame rate: a better service for TCP/IP in ATM networks

Guaranteed frame rate, approved by the ATM Forum, is expected to become an important service category to efficiently support TCP/IP traffic in ATM networks. We first describe the GFR traffic contract in detail. We then present different types of switch implementations that have been proposed to support GFR. We analyze the performance of three of these switch implementations by simulations in two different network environments. These simulations show that the scheduler-based implementations provide a much better performance than the simple switch implementation. However, we also show that coupling an active packet discard mechanism to a scheduler-based switch implementation does not produce a performance gain when many TCP connections are multiplexed inside one ATM VC.