A combined performance study of a fault-tolerant ATM switch and a video compression system

Abstract

The authors investigate the ability of a fault-tolerant ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) switch to switch the traffic generated by a variable bit rate video compression system. They also study the robustness of the video compression system to recover from the packet loss that is sustained in the ATM switch. Several cases are studied, including: fault-free performance; performance in the presence of single faults, with a focus on the effect of the location of the fault; the effect of the fault tolerant routing scheme employed; and the effect of varying the burst size of the video traffic. Based on the results of the study, recommendations are made on the mode of operation of the ATM switch.<>