In the past few years, Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network (B-ISDN) has received increasing attention as a communication architecture capable of supporting multimedia applications. Among the techniques proposed to implement B-ISDN, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is considered to be the most promising transfer technique because of its efficiency and flexibility.

In ATM networks, the performance bottleneck of the network, which was once the channel transmission speed, is shifted to the processing speed at the network switching nodes and the propagation delay of the channel. This shift is because the high-speed channel increases the ratio of processing time to packet transmission time and also the ratio of propagation delay to packet transmission time. The increased processing overhead makes it difficult to implement hop-by-hop schemes, which may impose prohibitably high processing at each switching node. The increased propagation delay overhead makes traffic control in ATM a challenge since a large number of packets can be in transit between two ATM switching nodes. Because of these fundamental changes, control schemes developed for traditional networks may not perform efficiently, and thus, new network architectures (congestion control schemes, error control schemes, etc.) are required in ATM networks.

In this dissertation, we first present an extensive survey of various traffic control schemes and network protocols for ATM networks. In this survey, possible traffic control schemes are examined, and problems of those schemes and their possible solutions are presented. Next, we investigate two key research issues in ATM networks (and other types of high-speed networks): the effects of protocol-processing overhead and the efficiency of traffic control schemes.

We first investigate the effects of protocol-processing overhead on the performance of error recovery schemes. Specifically, we investigate the performance trade-offs between link-by-link and edge-to-edge error recovery schemes. Our results show that for a network with high-speed/low-error-rate channels, an edge-to-edge scheme gives a smaller delay than a link-by-link scheme. We then investigate the effectiveness of a priority packet discarding scheme, a congestion control mechanism suitable for high-speed networks. We derive loss probabilities for each stream and investigate the impact of burstiness of traffic streams on the performance of individual streams.

Among the techniques proposed for B-ISDN transfer mode, ATM concept is considered to be the most promising transfer technique because of its flexibility and efficiency. This paper surveys and reviews a number of topics related to ATM networks. Those topics cover congestion control, provision of multiple classes of traffic, and error control. Due to the nature of ATM networks, those issues are far more challenging than in conventional networks. Sorne of the more promising solutions to those issues are surveyed, and the corresponding results on performance are summarized. Future research problems in ATM protocol aspect are also presented.

This paper investigates the effects of protocol-processing overhead on the performance of error recovery schemes in high-speed network environments. The investigated error recovery schemes are:

• an edge-to-edge error recovery scheme, where retransmissions of erred packets only take place between source and destination nodes, and

• a link-by-link error recovery scheme, where retransmissions only take place between adjacent switching nodes.

For retransmission of erred packets, we consider both Go-Back-N and Selective-Repeat procedures in the analysis.

The performance measures we obtain are the distribution of transfer delays and the loss probability of packets across a network. To obtain these measures, this paper develops a tandem queueing network model with feedbacks where each queue represents a protocol layer within a switching node, rather than a switching node as a whole.

Numerical results show that for a network with very-high-speed/low-error-rate channels, an edge-to-edge scheme gives the smaller packet transmission delay than a link-by-link scheme for both Go-back-N and Selective-Repeat retransmission procedures, while keeping the packet loss probability sufficiently small.

The emerging broadband integrated services digital network is expected to adopt ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) as the transport network. This new network must support several classes of service with varying delay and loss requirements. It must also operate with link speeds in the hundreds of megabits per second and be scalable up to potential link speeds on the order of gigabits per second. The requirements to support multiple services and high speed make the congestion control in an ATM network difficult. This paper reviews sorne of the techniques for prevention and control of congestion in an ATM network.

This paper considers a queueing system with a finite buffer and multiple heterogeneous arrival streams. We focus on Markov Modulated Arrival Processes with differing burstiness and investigate the loss of individual arrival streams when the parameters of the heterogeneous arrival streams are varied.

Our analysis follows a new stochastic integral approach and extends existing results for continuous-time Markov Modulated Poisson Arrival Processes to include both continuous-time and discrete-time treatments of multiplexed heterogeneous Markov Modulated Arrivals. In addition, we derive loss probabilities for a priority packet discarding scheme (a congestion control mechanism suitable for high-speed networks). Several interesting numerical results are presented; we introduce a new characterization of an arrival stream, which we refer to as self-loss, and use this to qualitatively predict the effects of multiplexing bursty streams with non-bursty streams.