FAIR BANDWIDTH ALLOCATION IN FRP-BASED ATM LOCAL-AREA NETWORKS

We propose burst based bandwidth reservation method called FRP (Fast R eservation Protocol) in ATM LAN with general topology, and evaluate it s performance. In FRP, the bandwidth is allocated on each link on burs t basis, not on call basis. This enables an effective use of network r esources when it is applied to highly bursty traffic, which can be typ ically found in data communications. The problem of FRP is that VCs tr aversing the different number of links experience different blocking p robabilities as can be found in the conventional circuit-switching net works. In this paper, we treat a fairness issue in FRP-based ATM local area networks. The Max-Min flow control is adopted as the fair bandwi dth allocation method to accomplish the fairness in the throughput. Ho wever, the original Max-Min flow control works in a centralized fashio n, which is not desirable in the FRP-based ATM LAN. We therefore propo se a ''semi''-distributed Max-Min flow control suitable to FRP, in whi ch each switch maintains its own local information about bandwidth usa ge of the connected links. Through simulation experiments, we show tha t the proposed semi-distributed Max-Min flow control can achieve the f airness among VCs as the original Max-Min flow control when the propag ation delays are not large and the number of VCs is not so much.