A New Cut-Through Forwarding Mechanism for ATM Multipoint-to-Point Connections

This paper presents a new Cut-through forwarding mechanism for multipoint-to-point communications over ATM networks. Initially, we present the cell interleaving problem and a concise description of current ATM multicast proposals. Then, we present an improvement to existing Cut-through forwarding schemes for providing a good level of fairness among the connections competing for the available bandwidth of the output link, while maintaining good throughput performance. This scheme is referred as Conditional Cutthrough forwarding (CCT) and as simulation results show, it supports multipoint- to-point connections efficiently.