Abstract
In this paper, a cell-based flow control scheme is proposed for interconnecting DQDB metropolitan area networks across an ATM switch with finite input buffer. In this scheme, a station on the DQDB subnetwork is permitted to transmit a segment to the ATM switch if and only if it receives a credit from the ATM switch. The network congestion is effectively prevented by the proposed scheme since no segment is lost in the ATM switch, and in the meantime, the transmission throughput of the interconnection system is maximized. The performance of this scheme is evaluated by simulations. The results show that the total throughput obtained by each DQDB subnetwork dynamically matches with the cell processing throughput of the ATM switch. Besides, each station on the DQDB subnetwork shares a fair bandwidth. By using this scheme, a reliable communication mechanism for directly interconnecting DQDB subnetworks to an ATM switch can be easily provided.