By the advancement of B-ISDN, ATM has been accepted as the future technology to integrate a variety of services as it is a fine comprise between circuit switching technology and packet switching technology. A cost-effective and simple way to realize the global network is to implement a backbone such as DQDB to interconnect the existing LANs and MANs to ATM. The major advantages of DQDB are the complete compatibility of different layers, the capability of handling real-time and non-real-time traffic and little degradation in delay performance with increase in network span and density.
However, a major issue of concern in the design of a DQDB/SMDS-ATM gateway is the transparent transfer of non-real-time traffic, as ATM is basically connection-oriented in nature. In the absence of flow control schemes in high-speed networking, some sort of congestion control mechanism becomes an absolute necessity to reduce the cell loss ratio to the minimum and thus wastage in the network resources. In this paper we discuss the transfer of connectionless traffic in a DQDB-ATM interconnection. One of the two congestion control mechanisms for DQDB networks that we have proposed is discussed in detail. In the request rate control mechanism the bandwidth utilization in DQDB is restricted by controlling the request rate from the gateway. DQDB networks interconnected by gateways are modelled and simulated. The request rate congestion control mechanism is evaluated. Simplicity in implementation and effectiveness in performance are the highlights.