Pipelined frames for ATM real-time traffic management

A congestion control strategy for real-time ATM traffic is proposed. This strategy, called virtual frame queueing, enhances the non-work-conserving service discipline of link-level framing with some features of work conserving disciplines. A single frame size can guarantee a broad range of delay bounds for any given network path and also define a common bound on cell delay variation, shared by all connections. An important feature is that the assigned delay bound need not increase significantly as a function of the number of nodes along the connection path. The strategy can be easily extended to multiple frame sizes.