Flow Control In High-speed Networks Research Articles

A control-theoretic approach to the design of an explicit rate controller for ABR service

We present a control-theoretic approach to the design of closed-loop rate-based flow control in high-speed networks. The proposed control uses a dual proportional-plus-derivative controller, where the control parameters can be designed to ensure the stability of the traffic patterns and propagation delays. We show how the control mechanism can be used to design a controller to support ABR service based on feedback of explicit rates (ERs). We demonstrate the excellent transient and steady-state performance of the controller through a number of examples. We also show experimental results that have been obtained from our asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) testbed, which consists of two interconnected ATM LANs, one located in Princeton, NJ, and the other in Berlin, Germany, with an all-software ER-controller implementation.

A Two-Level Flow Control Scheme for High Speed Networks

New applications such as multimedia remote conferencing demand network transport services with performance guarantees. At the same time, new networking technologies such as ATM are gearing towards providing services on a reservation-and-guarantee basis. In the light of the new application and networking environments, it seems necessary to revisit many of the transport protocol issues in search for more efficient ways to address them. This paper proposes using an explicit rate control together with a simple window control for flow control in high-speed networks with resource reservations. The design justifications, the evaluation study, and the implementation results are presented. Particularly, the idea of hard ACK and soft ACK in the context of end-to-end flow control is explored through simulation and the results are discussed.