Performance improvement of ABT protocols with combined bandwidth/buffer reservation

ABT (ATM block transfer) is expected for effectively transferring highly bu rsty data traffic in ATM networks. In the past work, ABT/IT has been shown to be robust in that its performance is not much affected by the propagatio n delay when compared with ABT/DT. However, when the traffic load becomes h eavy and/or when the number of hop counts of the connection becomes large, the throughput of ABT/IT is drastically decreased. We then propose a new pr otocol, Buffered-ABT/IT, which makes reservation on the buffer as well as t he bandwidth. The approximate analysis method is developed for buffered-ABT /IT. Through numerical examples, we show that it can improve the performanc e even in the above conditions compared with the existing ABT protocols. (C ) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.