ALPHA transport
Bahram Enshayan · ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review · 1985
The control of the resources of a packet switching network is a very difficult problem to solve. 1 Past attempts to solve this problem have been handicapped primarily by lack of an adequate means to quantify the user demands and then assign distributed resources to the demands in a globally coherent way. This paper presents a new approach to control the resources of packet switching networks. The key to this control is a new network transport scheme called alpha transport. Alpha transport combines the TDM circuit switching concept and packet switching technology. It is easy to implement and particularly cost effective to carry the subnet traffic of meshed packet switching networks. Alpha transport is robust, enables high utilization of the subnet bandwidth, reduces the subnet delay, and provides fairness.