In ATM networks, the Guaranteed Frame Rate (GFR) service has been proposed to accommodate non-real-time traffic with packet size not exceeding a maximum length, such as TCP/IP based traffic. The GFR service not only guarantees a minimum throughput at the frame level, but also supports a fair share of available resources. In this article, we propose a buffering strategy called Intelligent Fair Buffer Allocation (IFBA) that provides minimum cell rate (MCR) guarantees and fair sharing to GFR virtual circuits (VCs). From the simulation results, we demonstrate that IFBA fulfills the requirements of GFR service as well as improves the TCP throughput using the FIFO scheduling. 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.