California NAP Update

Aggregate Traffic Samples from Feb 7th indicates that the peak is 57Mbps and a low point of 15 Mbps. 15 minute samples are being done and this info will be available on the NAP WWW page. There are a number of participants that are listed. There are some pending connections and currently there is a hold on new orders for a couple of weeks.

A new switch will be brought on-line on February 25, 1996. This will be a Stratacom BPX using the 7.2.4 release using DS3 connections. In mid-2nd quarter, release 8 will be installed and will use OC-3.

There were four criteral.

High capacity backbone
Required 10Mb/sec today. This is current. With new software (release 8), this will improve to 20Mb/sec. This is quite a bit better than the current switch in use (order of magnitudes of improvement).
Buffering is important as well. Each peering link needs buffering. THe BPX does this on a per VC basis.
ABR is also available, but is currently proprietary. Stratacom will do the standards based ABR as soon as that is finalized by ATM Forum. Once the standard is in place, all queues, including those in the router, will be considered.
Advanced Traffic Management
Carrier Class Reliability
Scaleability

TCP Test Configuration

SGIs on FDDI were used.
Two switches with trunking were used, because that's the current
PACBELL NAP configuration
Cisco AIP/Kentrox ADU/CSU configurations were tested.

ABR Test Results

ABR was 12kc of output buffering on the bottelneck link like VBR.
There was no data lost using ABR (testing with ttcp). There was a limit of 500kb window because of SGI limitations.

Future Performance Enhancements

Proprietary ABR will be deployed initially. Standard-based ABR will be deployed when available.
Random Early discard for fairness and TCP Sync avoidance will be used
Early Packet Discard in ATM Switch
Early Packet Discard at router using ABR signalling.