We extend our earlier studies of buffer requirements of TCP over ABR in two directions. First, we study the performance of TCP over ABR in an ATM backbone. On the backbone, the TCP queues are at the edge router and not inside the ATM network. The router requires buffer equal to the sum of the receiver window sizes of the participating TCP connections. Second, we introduce various patterns of VBR background traffic. The VBR background introduces variance in the ABR capacity and the TCP traffic introduces variance in the ABR demand. Some simple switch schemes are unable to keep up with the combined effect of highly varying demands and highly varying ABR capacity. We present our experiences with refining the ERICA+ switch scheme to handle these conditions.

Complete Paper in Adobe Acrobat (701,553 Bytes)