TCP explicit congestion notification over ABR and UBR: an agent-based approach

A performance study of the explicit congestion notification (ECN) mechanism in the transmission control protocol (TCP) over ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) networks is presented. TCP's congestion control is enhanced so that congestion is indicated by not only packet losses as is currently the case but an agent implemented at the ATM network's edge as well. Our simulation experiments show that TCP ECN achieves: significantly lower cell loss, packet retransmissions, buffer utilisation and exhibits better throughput than (non-ECN) TCP Reno.