Determining cell loss bounds for ATM quality-of-service

Cell loss is a key measure for the performance of an ATM network. This paper presents an analysis of cell loss for periodic on/off (bursty) traffic sources. Periodic on/off traffic sources are representative of output traffic from leaky-bucket rate control mechanisms. Closed-form buffer size requirements and cell loss equations are developed and rigorously proved for queueing systems of increasing complexity. The closed-form equations developed can be used in concert with probabilistic methods to ensure that buffer and bandwidth allocations are made between the best and worst case requirements. The queueing systems considered: a single queue with multiple traffic sources, and multiple queues with multiple traffic sources serviced via a round-robin discipline. For each queueing system, a pessimistic and optimistic case for cell loss is defined in terms of the input traffic sources