The converging flows problem: an analytical study

When multiple systems are interconnected through a high-speed backbone network and communicate without resource reservation, under certain conditions a severe overload can appear at the destination system. This problem, called the converging flows problem, can be alleviated by use of a feedback control mechanism that coordinates the emission of the sources. The authors present a dynamic resource management mechanism that both controls the losses at the congested node and attempts to optimize resource utilization. In fact it steers the entire system into a desirable operating regime. They study analytically the behavior of the system under such a control and show that it can be reduced with a few approximations to a well-known physical system. This allows to infer optimal values for the parameters of the command algorithm, and the authors show that these values have a natural physical meaning to the system.