Optimal Policies for ATM Cell Scheduling and Rejection

This paper addresses the following questions related to buffer management schemes for high speed integrated services networks: (i) given the pattern of cell arrivals from different classes of traffic, can buffer control significantly influence the effect of cell loss, and (ii) what are the “best” policies for selecting cells for transmission from buffers in the network nodes as well as for rejecting cells when the buffers are full. The basic approach to answering these questions is to impute a cost of losing cells which could depend on the class of application, and to minimize this cost over the finite or infinite time horizons. The policies we derive using this cost minimization approach are best in the sense that they minimize linear cost functions of cell losses, at each instant of time during the system’s operation. We also show how to construct policies that minimize general cost functions of cell loss rates.