When carrying Internet Protocol (IP) traffic over an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network, the ATM adaptation layer must determine how long to hold a virtual circuit opened to carry an IP datagram. The authors present a formal statement of the problem and an empirical study of holding time policies taking network pricing into account. They find that IP traffic shows temporal locality of reference and so least recently used (LRU)-based policies perform well. A system-wide timeout, which is a special case of an LRU policy, is quite effective when the timeout value is chosen correctly. The policies proposed are easy to implement and solve the problem satisfactorily.
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