Fair packet discard as improvement of early packet discard

Previous papers have described and evaluated the performance of the early packet discard technique for maintaining packet integrity during overload in ATM switches. In this paper a packet discard scheme is proposed with the goal to provide both good performance in terms of throughput and fairness in terms of bandwidth exploitation of the output link among all virtual circuits. In the scenarios here considered, the proposed discard scheme is shown to provide very good results and to represent therefore a remarkable improvement of the classical early packet discard. Numerical results are reported and discussed for comparing these two discarding schemes under different operating conditions.