An Empirical Evaluation of Virtual Circuit Holding Times in IP-Over-ATM Networks

When carrying Internet Protocol (IP) traffic over an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) network, the ATM adaptation layer must determine how long to hold a virtual circuit opened to carry an IP datagram. We present a formal statement of the problem and an empirical study of holding time policies taking network pricing into account. We find that IP traffic shows temporal locality of reference and so Least Recently Used (LRU)-based policies perform well. A systemwide timeout, which is a special case of an LRU policy, is quite effective when the timeout value is chosen correctly. The policies we propose are easy to implement and solve the problem satisfactorily.