Atm switch congestion control method of connection setup requests and priority control method for receiving connection requests

Abstract

An ATM switch and a congestion control method are provided to handle connection setup requests from other ATM devices. In the ATM switch, a congestion detecting process detects congestion of a class that has a number of the connection setup requests stored by class in the buffer equal to T(x), a predetermined number of the connection setup requests to be stored for each of the classes. A message discarding process discards the received connection setup request if it belongs to the congested class. Furthermore, a priority control method for receiving connection setup requests is provided to establish connections more efficiently. A branching process detects a port to which the connection setup request is inputted, identifies a priority class which corresponds to the port using a priority table, and stores the connection setup request in one of queues which are provided for each priority class. An extracting process extracts the connection setup request from the queue of the priority class to be extracted according to a predetermined algorithm.