Fair network bandwidth allocation with minimum rate guarantee and its ABR implementations

A novel concept in available bit rate (ABR) service model as defined by the ATM Forum is the minimum cell rate (MCR) bandwidth guarantee for each connection. In this paper, we present a network bandwidth allocation policy to support each ABR connection's MCR requirement, as well as its peak cell rate (PCR) constraint. Furthermore, we develop two explicit-rate (ER) based ABR algorithms consistent with the ATM Forum ABR traffic management framework to achieve this rate allocation policy. The first ABR implementation is a simple heuristic algorithm which does not require per-VC accounting. It requires minimal implementation complexity and offers satisfactory performance in a LAN environment. The second ABR implementation employs per-VC accounting and is proven to converge to our rate allocation policy for any network topology and any set of link distances.