The IP over ATM Mailing List Archive by date

[Arthur Lin <alin@cisco.com>]

>     As I recall, the original plan was that network center switches
could be
>     inexpensive due to
>     the low resource requirements - no significant buffering is
required if
>     proper management is 
>     used for the allocation of VCCs to links and everyone behaves
themselves or
>     we police them
>     into shape to enforce the contracts.
> 
> Yes, and a lot of us thought that idea was bogus from the start.  It
only
> works if you assume traffic is very nicely distributed and
multiplexes
> nicely.  And we knew that data wasn't going to fit that mold from the
start.
> The pain was that until about 1993 (when the self-similar traffic
work came
> along), we didn't have a good way to convincingly explain this
problem to
> folks who wanted to believe burst-Poisson models were perfect.
> 
> Craig

the self-similar work is only useful in two aspects for the 
switch/router buffer dimensioning problem:

1) high-frequency components of traffic are very effectively 
   handled by effective buffering, and 
2) low-frequency components of traffic can only be controlled 
   by peak rate allocation (increasing buffers has very minimal 
   performance gain).

-arthur