Inverse multiplexing for ATM. Operation, applications and performance evaluation for the cell loss ratio

The growing demands of bandwidth users make, indicate that access to ATM networks is an important issue. Inverse multiplexing for ATM (IMA) is a technology that combines multiple T1/E1 links to create a single logical data trunk which bandwidth is the aggregate of the T1/E1 ones, minus a small amount due to overhead. By using this technology, it is possible to have ATM connections with data rates between the T1/E1 (an economical but too slow option) and T3/E3 ones (with high bandwidth, but expensive). Also, it is interesting to have expressions easy to compute that approximate the main quality of service parameters of inverse multiplexers (IMUX) to help network planners in the dimensioning of these systems. In this paper, we study an estimate for the cell loss ratio (CLR) measured in the IMUX devices.