Since the slice is the basic reconstruction unit at the display device, the MPEG-2-based Video traffic in an ATM network is treated as many slice flows. For a real-time MPEG-2-based video service, the most important restriction is that all cells in a slice flow must be transmitted to their destination node completely before the deadline; otherwise, they should be dropped totally. The main purpose of this article is to propose a flow-oriented input-queued ATM switching router architecture with a scheduling strategy, MCL-MSL, taking advantage of the above characteristics to achieve higher-quality video services and more efficient utilization of network bandwidth. If the needed bandwidth for transmitting slice flows exceeds the available network bandwidth, MCL-MSL selects the slice flow with minimum slice loss for transmission. Furthermore, if multiple choices exist, it selects the one with maximum cell toss among them to achieve the most efficient bandwidth utilization.
