ATM ABR Traffic Control with a Generic Weight-Based Bandwidth Sharing Policy: Theory and a Simple Implementation

Yiwei Thomas HOU  Henry H. -Y. TZENG  Shivendra S. PANWAR  Vijay P. KUMAR  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E81-B   No.5   pp.958-972
Publication Date: 1998/05/25
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Issue on ATM Traffic Control and Performance Evaluation)
Category: ATM Traffic Control
Keyword: 
max-min policy,  minimum rate requirement,  peak rate constraint,   centralized and distributed algorithms,  heuristics,   congestion and flow control algorithms,  ABR traffic control,  ATM networks,  

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Summary: 
The classical max-min policy has been suggested by the ATM Forum to support the available bit rate (ABR) service class. However, there are several drawbacks in adopting the max-min rate allocation policy. In particular, the max-min policy is not able to support the minimum cell rate (MCR) requirement and the peak cell rate (PCR) constraint for each ABR connection. Furthermore, the max-min policy does not offer flexible options for network providers wishing to establish a usage-based pricing criterion. In this paper, we present a generic weight-based rate allocation policy, which generalizes the classical max-min policy by supporting the MCR/PCR for each connection. Our rate allocation policy offers a flexible usage-based pricing strategy to network providers. A centralized algorithm is presented to compute network-wide bandwidth allocation to achieve this policy. Furthermore, a simple switch algorithm using ABR flow control protocol is developed with the aim of achieving our rate allocation policy in a distributed networking environment. The effectiveness of our distributed algorithm in a local area environment is substantiated by simulation results based on the benchmark network configurations suggested by the ATM Forum.