Congestion Control in an Atm Network

Broadband ISDN resource allocation and congestion control present a major challenge. A preventative control scheme based on a call admission procedure and source policing is favoured by a number of groups. This paper investigates the behaviour of the leaky bucket policing mechanism. Simulation studies of a simple ATM multiplexer model in which a number of policed sources feed a deterministically served buffer indicate that under overload conditions the leaky bucket can introduce correlations into the policed stream. These correlations result in lower than expected long term cell loss within the network accompanied by a rise in the conditional probability of successive cell losses for a particular user.