Performance study of buffer management schemes under multicasting traffic in ATM switching nodes

Multimedia applications in broadband ISDN present various types and classes of traffics such as video teleconferencing, broadband telephony and large file transfers. Multicasting is important in multimedia applications. Since cell loss in a multicast packet will cause the retransmission of the entire packet causing excessive load in the network, the ATM switch should provide for the reduction of cell loss of multicast traffic. The reduction in cell loss of a particular type of traffic should be done in coordination with the QoS parameters required from other classes within each traffic type. Buffering schemes are used in ATM switches to achieve the required levels of QoS. In this paper, we develop a new buffering scheme which considers traffic types that include multicasting and nonmulticasting components with two classes of cells within each traffic type. We compare the new buffering scheme with two existing schemes, No Priority and Push Out. We show that the new buffering scheme performs better than the two other schemes by reducing cell loss of multicast cells. We also introduce a new cell scheduling policy that produces lower delay for the delay sensitive class. The new buffering and scheduling schemes provide the ability to tune the cell loss and delay of each class of cells within each traffic type. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.