A study on the Improvement of TCP over ATM

The Asynchronous Transfer Mode(ATM) networks are being adopted as backbones over various parts of Internet. Also, TCP is one of the most widespread transport protocols, nowadays. It can be used with ATM. But, TCP shows poor end-to-end performance on ATM networks. Effective throughput of TCP over ATM can be quite low when cells are dropped at the congested ATM switch. The low throughput is due to wasted bandwidth as congested link transmits cells from corrupted packets. This paper examines the behavior of TCP over ATM-UBR using EPD switch in a broadband environment. With a threshold close to the buffer size, the buffer can be used more efficiently, but more drops and retransmission occurs. If the threshold is much less than buffer size, efficient is not good, but few drops can happen. Therefore, decision of the threshold is important.