Engineering ATM networks for congestion avoidance

Abstract

With the combination of telecommunication, entertainment and computer industries, computer networking is adopting a new method called Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networking. Congestion control plays an important role in the effective and stable operation of ATM networks. Traffic management concerns with the design of a set of mechanisms which ensure that the network bandwidth, buffer and computational resources are efficiently utilized while meeting the various Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees given to sources as part of a traffic contract. In this paper, the most widely recognized congestion control schemes for ABR service are investigated. Some of these schemes show either lack of scalability or fairness while other well‐behaved schemes may require a highly complex switch algorithm that is unsuitable for implementation in cell‐switching high‐speed ATM networks. A new and improved congestion control scheme is proposed to support the best‐effort ABR traffic. This algorithm provides the congestion avoidance ability with high throughput and low delay, in addition to achieving the max–min fairness allocation.