IP over connection-oriented networks and distributional paging

Next generation wide area network are very likely to use connection-oriented protocols such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). For the huge existing investment in current IP networks such as the Internet to remain useful, me must devise mechanisms to carry IP traffic over connection-oriented networks. A basic issue is to devise holding policies for virtual circuits carrying datagrams. In this paper we consider two variants of the paging problem that arise in the design of such holding policies. In the IP-paging problem the page inter-request times are chosen according to independent distributions. For this model we construct a very simple deterministic algorithm whose page fault rate is at most 5 times that of the best online algorithm (that knows the inter-request time distributions). We also show that some natural algorithms for this problem do not have constant competitive ratio. In distributional paging the inter-request time distributions may be dependent, and hence any probabilistic model of page request sequences can be represented. We construct a simple randomized algorithm whose page fault rate is at most 4 times that of the best online algorithm.<
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