Simulation and analysis of IP/ATM switching and routing

This paper presents a comparative study of different techniques used for communicating among distinct IP subnetworks over an ATM infrastructure. The technologies dealt with are IP routing on an ATM infrastructure, ATM switching and IP switching. The study relies on simulators specially designed and implemented for each technology. These simulators take as input two real traffic traces that have been collected on the Internet, respectively on a campus and a corporate environment. For each traffic trace, important parameters have been identified and analyzed to verify how they do affect the performance of each technology. The comparison among the different approaches has taken into account such parameters like the VC space, the number of established flows, the average packet delay, the flow creation delay, the connection release delay, the routing delay, etc. The simulation results will permit us to tune some parameters of each technology, and to choose, depending on the traffic requirements, the solution that appears to be the most appropriate for communicating among different IP subnetworks over an ATM infrastructure.