Early Packet Discard

• Romanow, A., and Floyd, S., Dynamics of TCP Traffic over ATM Networks. IEEE JSAC, V. 13 N. 4, May 1995, p. 633-641. Abstract. [ Data from some of the figures.] An earlier version appeared in SIGCOMM '94, August 1994, pp. 79-88.

  The simulator used for the ATM-based simulations in this paper belongs to Allyn Romanow, and is not publicly available. The simulator used for the packet-based simulations is the ns simulator.

Other papers on EPD (Early Packet Discard)

• Lampros Kalampoukas and Anujan Varma, "Performance of TCP over multi-hop ATM networks: A comparative study of ATM-layer congestion control schemes," Tech. Rep. UCSC-CRL-95-13, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064 USA, 1995.
• Jonathan Turner, "Maintaining High Throughput during Overload in ATM Switches", in IEEE Infocom 96, San Fransisco, California, Mar. 1996. Abstract.
• Kenji Kawahara, Kouichirou Kitajima, Tetsuya Takine, and Yuji Oie, Packet loss performance of selective cell discard schemes in ATM networks, IEEE JSAC, V. 15 N. 5, June 1997, pp. 903-913. Abstract of the Infocom 96 version of the paper.
• Casoni, M., and Turner, J. S., On the Performance of Early Packet Discard, IEEE JSAC, V. 15 N. 5, June 1997, pp. 892-902.
• Laurent Jaussi, Martin Lorang, and Jordi Nelissen, A Detailed Experimental Performance Evaluation on TCP over UBR, to appear at the IEEE International Conference on ATM '98, Colmar, France, June 1998.
  "An efficient co-operation of EPD with TCP's retransmission strategy has been found to be the key requirement for good TCP over UBR performance with relatively small buffers, compared to the TCP window size. However, in experiments with ... a dominance of timeout, ... EPD has little impact. In this case, only a reduction of the timer granularity ... reduced idle time."
• Yonghwan Kim and San-qi Li, Performance Analysis of Data Packet Discarding in ATM Networks, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, April 1999.
  This paper compares early packet discarding with packet tail discarding, and concludes that EPD generally gives signigicantly better performance.
• Other papers on Early Packet Discard can be found by searching for "EPD" or "Early Packet Discard" on Henning Schulzrinne's Bibliography of Networking Research.

Implementations:

• Information about Early Packet Discard on Cisco's web pages can be found by doing a search for "early packet discard" on their search engine.
• Fore Systems supported Early Packet Discard and Partial Packet Discard in many of their ATM switch products.
• IgT: White Paper: IgT ATM Switching Solutions: Position Paper.
• Fujitsu ATM Product Overview: MB86680 (SRE) Self-Routing Switch Element.
• Bay Networks

Mailing List Archives on Packet Discard:

• Re: Packet Discard Strategies, The Cell-Relay Mailing List Archive. Search for "Packet Discard".
• Re: Packet Discard vs Flow Control. The IP over ATM Mailing List Archive. Search for "Packet Discard".

Related Papers:

• Jean Calvignac, Patrick Droz, Claude Basso, and Doug Dykeman, Dynamic IDentifier Assignment (DIDA) for Merged ATM Connections, ATM Forum / 97-0504, July 1997. URL http://www.zurich.ibm.com/~dro/atm-97-0504.txt.
  This includes a section on "DIDA and Early Packet Discard".

Return to [ Sally Floyd].
Last modified: July 2000. Links updated: October 2008.