Effective cell loss analysis of a nonblocking ATM switch with nonuniform traffic

This paper quantifies a trade-off existing between cell loss and cell delay in an ATM switch with arbitrary input and output buffer sizes. The effective cell loss is introduced as a cell loss performance measure which combines both the cell loss due to buffer overflow and the cell loss due to excessive delay. This effective cell loss measure allows one to design optimal input and output buffer sizes for a given cell loss requirement. Our analysis is versatile enough to easily study the adverse effect due to nonuniform traffic patterns at a switch. The study shows that the nonuniform traffic may jeopardize ATM switches designed under the uniform traffic assumption. For some examples, we have provided both numerical and computer simulation results to show the validity and usefulness of our analysis.