PRIORITY MANAGEMENT IN ATM SWITCHING NODES

The future broadband ISDN needs a high degree of flexibility in order to cope with a great variety of services with widely differing bandwidth and quality of service requirements. The asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), which is now widely accepted as the basis for this network [2], offers very flexible information transfer with respect to bandwidth requirements. The introduction of a special class of priorities, called space priorities, adds a quality of service flexibility to the ATM bearer service. This paper describes various space priority mechanisms and their detailed performance evaluation. Furthermore, a comparative performance study is given, indicating the excellent performance characteristics of a simple buffer management scheme called partial buffer sharing.