Enterprise networks using Ethernet switches at the edge of the network and A TM switches in the core of the network have become a common model in the industry. In such networking environment, TCP is used as the end-to-end flow control mechanism(transport layer) and ABR as the edge-to-edge flow control mechanism (link layer). It is well known that ABR pushes congestion to the edge of the network, thereby alleviating congestion in the ATM network but resulting in buffer overflows and packetlosses at the interworking Ethernet/ATM unit, thus degrading end-to-end performance. In this paper; we investigate the interworking behavior between the TCP flow control mechanism and ABR flow control mechanism, and show that appropriate bufferprovisioning in the edge devices results in acceptable TCP performance. However; fairness between competing connections is not perfectly achieved. We also show that different TCP flavors exhibit distinctive performance behavior.
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