Performance of TCP in IP/ATM internetworks

The Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) level flow control schemes and their impact on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) over ATM have been extensively studied (Fang et al., A simulation study of TCP performance in ATM networks, in: Proceedings of IEEE GLOBECOM'94, San Francisco, 28 November-2 December 1994, pp. 1217-1223: S. Kalyanaraman et al., Performance of TCP/IP over ABR, in: Proceedings of Globecom'96, London, November 1996; H. Li et al., A simulation study of TCP performance in ATM networks with ABR and UBR services, in: INFOCOM'96, March 1996). In this paper, we extend the work of Yin and Jagannath (End-to-end traffic management in IP/ATM internetworks, ATM Forum Contribution 96-1406, October 1996) on TCP over available bit rate (ABR) and unspecified bit rate (UBR) services in an IP/ATM internetworking environment, and provide a more comprehensive study on this important issue. We compare TCP performance in terms of goodput and fairness and discuss the performance tradeoff among different types of services. We also investigate the ATM edge congestion with different traffic scenarios in various networks configurations and system setups. In particular, a simple and effective scheme to prevent ATM edge buffer overflow is proposed in this paper. Simulation results are provided to show that our scheme can reduce the ATM edge congestion, and therefore provide significant improvement of TCP goodput. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.