On hop-by-hop rate-based congestion control

The activity in building gigabit speed networks has led many researchers to re-examine the issue of congestion control. We describe a rate-based hop-by-hop congestion control mechanism in which the service rates of connections are dynamically adjusted at a switch, using feedback information provided by the neighboring switches. The desired service rate is computed based on a control equation that utilizes a model of the system with feedback information used to correct inaccuracies in the model. We use an analytical model to prove that the expected value of the queue occupancy and throughput of a controlled connection converge to the desired operating point. We also study the variation of the queue occupancy and throughput in steady-state as well as the transient response. The analytical results provide insights into how the parameter values chosen affect performance. We use simulations to compare the performance of the scheme with an equivalent end-to-end control scheme. Our analytical and simulation results show that the hop-by-hop scheme reacts faster to changes in the traffic intensity and, consequently, utilizes resources at the bottleneck better and loses fewer packets than the end-to-end scheme.