A PERFORMANCE-MODEL FOR ATM SWITCHES WITH GENERAL PACKET LENGTH DISTRIBUTIONS

The maximum throughput of an ATM switch is investigated in the presenc e of an offered load of multicell packets, For the case of input queue ing coupled with a round-robin policy for transferring cells from inpu ts to outputs, the system is approximated by a product form queueing n etwork, Under the assumption that packet lengths are described by rand om variables with discrete Coxian distributions, it is shown that the balance equations describing the behavior of the ATM switch approach t hose for a product form queueing network and that the steady-state pro babilities of such an ATM switch approach the product-form solution as the cell length tends to zero, Last, a numerical investigation shows that the approximation yields good results, even when the packet lengt hs are not well described by Coxian distributions.