ATM is based on the premise that, by using the natural burstiness of voice and data traffic, it is possible to have an almost twofold gain in bandwidth utilization. This gain is offset, however, by the demands of voice traffic that packets not be lost and that the delay between packets be predictable. As a result, congestion control is important to the quality of service in an ATM network.
Congestion control is dependent on the arrival model used.
They produce from this a simple estimate of the blocking probabilities for broad classes of traffic. They suggest the use of their estimates as the means of congestion control within the ATM switch. They have greatly reduced the complexity that exists in some of the more detailed queueing models. The models they propose are generic and may not take into account some of the variations in arrival that can be expected. Their estimates have the distinct advantage, however, of being simple to compute in UAA form.