A simplified approach based on source control for ATM ABR service

Abstract

The available bit rate (ABR) service is designed to provide efficient support of data traffic in ATM networks. A variety of rate-based flow control approaches have been proposed to support ABR service. Most of these approaches improve both the fairness among active connections and the link utilization by putting more and more complexity into a switch. In this article, we propose a flow control approach in which part of rate-calculation work is moved from switches to end-systems. As a result, the proposed approach reduces the rate-calculation effort in the switch. This may reduce the switch complexity and thus the implementation cost. Furthermore, it mitigates the difficulty for setting the measurement interval in switches, as well as features lower and more stable queue occupancy in the network. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves better performance than ERICA+, a well-known switch algorithm.