A cell scheduling algorithm for VBR traffic in an ATM multiplexer

An efficient cell scheduling algorithm is proposed for multiplexing traffic sources with variable bit rate requirement in an ATM multiplexer. Three types of traffic sources an assumed in the multiplexer, namely the constant bit rate (CBR), variable bit rate (VBR), and best-effort traffic. For VBR and CBR sources, a statistical bandwidth requirement should be claimed before they are multiplexed in the ATM outgoing link. The proposed algorithm dynamically schedules the traffic and preserves the claimed throughput in the outgoing link for each CBR or VBR source. When there is no cell arrival at the VBR or CBR sources, the proposed algorithm assigns the bandwidth to the best-effort sources. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated via simulation. The result shows that the proposed method has better performance over other static multiplexing schemes such as the weighted round-robin method.