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 switchconnected to a bottleneck link fairly and reasonably among manycompetitive users, and to maintain the buffer queue length of the switchat a desired level in order to avoid congestion in Asynchronous TransferMode (ATM) networks. In this paper, a control theoretic approach thatuses a Deadbeat-Response (DR) controller to the design of a rate-basedflow control mechanism is presented. The mechanism has a simple structureand is robust in the sense that its stability is notsensitive to the change of the number of active Virtual Connections(VCs). Simulation results show that this mechanism not only ensures fairshare of the bandwidth for all active VCs regardless of the number ofhops they traverse but also has the advantages of fast convergence, nooscillation, and high link bandwidth utilization.