Application of the Active Cell Discard Mechanism to Classical Internet Protocols*

Cell fragmentation is one of the major problems when transferring packet based information through cell-based ATM networks. Cell discarding policies try to alleviate these problems by reducing the portion of resources that is wasted du e to cells belonging to partially lost packets. The Active Cell Discard mechanism is a discarding strategy that tries to keep the most essential information o f the communication by saving the set of initial cells of every packet. It was originally thought t o work with multimedia traffic but it s behavior when applied to classical protocols is equally important. These paper presents s ome results obtained for FTP, RSH and HTTP. FTP and RSH improve their transfer time in some cases when running in congested networks. But there is no difference in the behavior of HTTP when ACD is applied; though local processing in the HTTP client could cause it.