Performance of Shared Output Queuing in Atm Switches under Self-similar Traffic

There is increasing evidence that multimedia traffic in a variety of networks including the Internet, exhibits properties of self-similarity such as long-range dependence and a high-degree of correlation between arrivals. The demands of self-similar traffic impose unique new requirements in switch design, especially as far as the buffering strategy is concerned. In this paper, we study buffer sharing in the presence of self-similar traffic generated using the fractional ARIMA model. Our results quantify the loss in performance under self-similar traffic as opposed to Poisson traffic, using shared and dedicated output buffering strategies. We show that, with self-similar traffic, shared output buffering in comparison with dedicated output buffering, provides higher throughput and lower cell loss probability, but at the cost of higher cell delay. These results have important implications in the design of switch-based networked multimedia systems.