Design and evaluation of a connection management mechanism for an ATM-based connectionless service

The Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) has been developed as a connection-oriented technique for the transfer of fixed-size cells over high-speed networks. Many applications, however, require a connectionless network service. In order to provide such a technique, one can built a connectionless service on top of the connection-oriented service. In doing so, the issue of connection management comes into play. In this paper we propose a new connection management mechanism that provides for low bandwidth usage (as compared to a permanent connection) and low delays (as compared to a connection-perpacket approach). We model the new mechanism under two workload scenarios: an ordinary Poisson process and an interrupted Poisson process. We use Markovian techniques as well as matrix-geometric methods to evaluate the new connection management mechanism. From the evaluations it turns out the proposed mechanism is superior to older approaches (which can be seen as limiting cases). 1 Geert Heijenk is currently with Ericsson Business Mobile Networks B.V., P.O. Box 645, 7500 AP, Enschede, the Netherlands (email: [email protected]). 2 Boudewijn R. Haverkort is currently with the RWTH-Aachen, LFG Informatik / Verteilte Systeme, D-52056, Germany (email: [email protected]).