Increasing multimedia traffic throughput in high-speed WAN's using buffer management

High-speed multimedia networks using ATM technology are being planned for deployment. Until a universal ATM network is in place, we expect to see a lot of interworking of legacy LANs with ATM WANs. This paper investigates efficient interworking between these diverse technologies and more specifically, we look into the problem of controlling packet loss-rates of multimedia informations on an end-to-end basis. We present an intelligent buffer management algorithm which would operate within the real-time usage parameter control paradigm of an ATM switch. We show that inspite of forward error correction recovery schemes, this kind of buffer management can increase raw throughput in situations where retransmission is either too costly or not possible. Preliminary simulation have yielded encouraging results.