Tractable analysis of a finite capacity polling system under bursty and correlated ATM arrivals

The authors consider the mean delay and the cell loss probability that bursty and correlated arrivals incur in an ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) switching module which can be modeled as a finite-capacity polling system with nonexhaustive cyclic service. The arrival process to each input port of the system is modeled by a Markov modulated Bernoulli process (MMBP) which is able to describe the bursty and correlated nature of the ATM traffic. A practical polling system with finite capacity does not lend itself to an exact solution. The authors introduce a tractable approach to providing an analytical approximation. It is shown that both the mean delays and the cell loss probabilities obtained from this analysis provide accurate estimates.<>