Abstract: A cell discard scheme serves as an effective method in either alleviating or eliminating network congestion in ATM network nodes. Existing cell discard strategies, however,do not consider the relationship between cell discarding and network utilization. Consequently, they lead to poor measures of both the average network utilization and the cell loss ratio concerning user services sensitive to semantics. From the viewpoint of the relative volume of network resources having been consumed by a cell arriving at a certain ATM network node, a new cell discard strategy, the forwardingstrengthbased one, is proposed in the paper here, with removal of the above defects as its objective. By using the Markov model, the average network utilization and the cell loss ratio are analyzed with respect to the proposed cell discard strategy and the two classical ones available. The results show that by discarding cells having consumed minimal network resources, this new strategy can improve network performance through increasing the network utilization ratio, decreasing the cell loss ratio and cell retransmission volumes, alleviating network congestion, and reducing the possibility of recongestion in ATM network nodes.