Design and analysis of an ABR flow control protocol

This paper presents an ABR flow control protocol which fully controls the link bandwidth and switch buffer utilization. It prevents traffic overflow and resource under-utilization and is capable of achieving high network utilization while keeping minimum cell loss probability. This protocol uses explicit rate declaration on a link-by-link basis and derives the cell rate directly from the utilization of link bandwidth and the occupancy of buffer space at each switch. Design rules as well as control theoretical analyses are elaborated for understanding and evaluation of the protocol.