A flow control protocol for CRMA/ATM networks interconnection

Losing ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) cells in an interworking unit between a high-speed LAN (local area network) such as a Gbit/s CRMA (cyclic reservation multiple access) LAN and an ATM based wide area network can be a serious problem due to the retransmissions caused by the higher layer protocol. The authors propose a flow control protocol, which, exploiting the characteristics of the CRMA scheme, regulates the emission of cells towards the CRMA/ATM interworking unit so that its buffer resources are not saturated. The emission of the ATM stations is controlled via a backpressure mechanism. The capacity of the gateway buffer is virtually increased by utilizing the network latency as well as the station buffers. The main protocol performance is analyzed by simulation.<
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