A rate-based flow control mechanism for avoiding congestion

The rate-based flow control mechanisms for the Available Bit Rate (ABR) service are used to share the available bandwidth of a bottleneck switch connected to a bottleneck link fairly and reasonably among many competitive users, and to maintain the buffer queue length of the switch at a desired level in order to avoid congestion in Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks. In this paper, a control theoretic approach that uses a Deadbeat-Response (DR) controller to the design of a rate-based flow control mechanism is presented. The mechanism has a simple structure and is robust in the sense that its stability is not sensitive to the change of the number of active Virtual Connections (VCs). Simulation results show that this mechanism not only ensures fair share of the bandwidth for all active VCs regardless of the number of hops they traverse but also has the advantages of fast convergence, no oscillation, and high link bandwidth utilization.