On the multiplexing effects of the ATM traffic

Traffic measurements taken from real data are highly desirable for validating traffic models, designing congestion control and flow control algorithms, implementing communication protocols, and developing switch architectures. This paper investigates the traffic characteristics of several applications in an ATM network with the goal of studying bursty traffic behavior and realizing the multiplexing effects of variable bit rate (VBR) traffic. Specifically, three types of traffic (ftp, voice, and video) are obtained from an ATM testbed. These applications are reported to be important applications that tend to dominate the wide-area networks. The multiplexing effects of FTP traffic are studied to identify empirical bandwidth requirements. The characteristics of the multiplexing effects can be applied to develop an efficient call admission algorithm based on the measured data. These experimental results designed to investigate traffic characteristics provide insights to bursty traffic behavior and performance requirements of practical real-time loads.