Concept of backlog balancing and its application to flow control and congestion control in high-speed networks

Flow control algorithm in high speed networks is a resource-sharing policy implemented in a distributed manner. This paper introduces a novel concept of backlog balancing and demonstrates its application to network flow control and congestion control by presenting a rate-based flow control algorithm for ATM networks. The_aim of flow control is to maximize the network utilization for achieving high throughput with tolerable delay for each virtual circuit (VC). In a resource-sharing environment, this objective may also cause network congestion when a cluster of aggressive VC's are contending for the same resource at a particular node. The basic idea of our algorithm is to adjust the service rate of each node along a VC according to backlog discrepancies between neighboring nodes (i.e., to reduce the backlog discrepancy). The handshaking procedure between any two consecutive nodes is carried out by a link-by-link binary feedback protocol. Each node will update its service rate periodically based on a linear projection model of the flow dynamics. The updated service rate per VC at a node indicates : its explicit demand of bandwidth, so a service policy implementing dynamic bandwidth allocation is introduced to enforce such ( demands. Simulation study has validated the concept and its significance in achieving the goal of flow control and yet preventing network congestion at the same time.