A simulation study of TCP performance in ATM networks

The paper presents a simulation study of TCP performance over congested ATM local area networks. The authors simulated a variety of schemes for congestion control for ATM LANs, including a simple cell-drop, a credit-based row control scheme that back-pressures individual VCs, and two selective cell-drop schemes. The simulation results for congested ATM LANs show the following: (1) TCP performance is poor under simple cell-drop, (2) the selective cell-drop schemes increase effective link utilization and result in higher TCP throughputs than the simple cell-drop scheme, and (3) the credit-based flow control scheme eliminates cell loss and achieves maximum performance and effective link utilization.