Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is an important enabling technology for the integration of all types of services. It is widely considered to be a new solution for Broadband Integrated Services Digital Networks (B-ISDN) supporting integrated services in different environments. ATM is gaining an increasing interest and popularity especially for high-speed networking, metropolitan area networks and local and wide area networks.
ATM networks are being progressively deployed. In many cases, ATM technology is replacing old technologies due to its many advantages. Most of the existing applications can operate over ATM via service emulation or service internetworking along with proper adaptation of data formats. The introduction of ATM has prompted many developers to find new applications that take full advantage of the many impressive characteristics and capabilities of this technology.
Emerging services have greatly affected the architectural requirements of ATM switches and networks. ATM systems are being designed to accommodate many new requirements, protocols, and schemes. Over the past decade, great progress has been achieved in the design, theory, protocols, and applications of ATM systems. Despite this impressive progress there are many issues that need to be resolved. Among these issues are traffic modeling and characterization, routing, switching, buffering, congestion and flow control, provision of quality of service, QoS, and performance evaluation. This special issue of the International Journal of Communication Systems is dedicated to the performance evaluation of ATM systems. The papers accepted for this special issue represent important research efforts that are being performed by both the academic and industrial research communities worldwide.
In the first paper, Rai and Oh propose a method based on asymptotic results of a renewal process to obtain the equivalent MMPP (2) parameters. They