On determining the fair bandwidth share for ABR connections in ATM networks

The available bit rate (ABR) service is designed to fairly allocate the bandwidth unused by higher priority services. The network indicates to the ABR sources the rates at which they should transmit to minimize their cell loss. Switches must constantly measure the demand and available capacity, and divide the capacity fairly among the contending connections. In order to compute the fair and efficient allocation for each connection, a switch needs to determine the effective number of active connections. We propose a method for determining the number of active connections and the fair bandwidth share for each. We prove the efficiency and fairness of the proposed method analytically, and simulate it for a number of configurations.