We investigate the performance of TCP connections over ATM networks without ATM-level congestion control and compare it to the performance of TCP over packet-based networks. For simulations of congested networks, the effective throughput of TCP over ATM can be quite low when cells are dropped at the congested ATM switch, The low throughput is due to wasted bandwidth as the congested link transmits cells from ''corrupted'' packets, i.e., packets in which at least one cell. is dropped by the switch. We investigate two packet-discard strategies that alleviate the effects of fragmentation. Partial packet discard, in which remaining cells are discarded after one cell has been dropped from a packet, somewhat improves throughput. We introduce early packet discard, a strategy in which the switch drops whale packets prior to buffer overflow, This mechanism prevents fragmentation and restores throughput to maximal levels.
