Cells splitting/merging strategy to reduce call blocking probability in ATM networks

In ATM networks, call admission control (CAC) is employed during the call setup phase to determine whether a virtual channel or virtual path connection request can be accepted or rejected. Most of CACs will reject an incoming call if no path can be found with enough bandwidth from source to destination. However, at the moment of rejecting a call, the total remaining network bandwidth may be large enough to service it. In this paper, we define the multiple path selection problem in ATM networks and propose an algorithm to find the minimum number of paths. Based on the found paths, two cell splitting/merging strategies are introduced. The splitting/merging operation is based on the sequence number within each cell. To guarantee that the cell stream sequence received at the destination is the same as that delivered at the source, the maximum number of consecutive cells that can be dropped on a split path is analyzed. Moreover, a simple buffer replacement scheme is proposed to improve the tolerance of burst cell loss.