Accelerating ATM: on-line compression of ATM streams

Abstract

Since ATM switches intended to be simple and inexpensive, a significant part of the network cost is in the cost of the links. A way of increasing the traffic we can send over these expensive links is to transmit compressed ATM cells. This idea, although it seems very simple, is a new one for ATM and in this paper we show that it can significantly increase the bandwidth of a typical ATM network. We also show that the buffer size needed for accommodating the peaks introduced by the compression is not prohibitively large, the delay our compression scheme introduces is very low, and that this scheme can be very effective when used with IP traffic.