End-to-end traffic management in IP/ATM internetworks

This paper looks at the end-to-end perspective in IP/ATM internetworks. In the internetwork environment the ABR flow control mechanism is applicable to the ATM part while the TCP flow control determines the amount of data and the congestion in the network. In this paper we consider the problem of end-to-end traffic management and show that in limited buffer scenarios UBR service with early packet discard (EPD) may perform comparably to ABR or even outperform ABR. We perform simulation studies and consider the end-to-end TCP throughput and the file transfer delay for different ATM network flow control schemes. We discuss the issue of trade-off between the buffer requirement at the edge device (edge of the ATM cloud) versus buffer requirement inside the ATM network. We show that it is not sufficient to have a lossless ATM network when we are looking at traffic management from and end-to-end point of view.