Providing rate guarantees to TCP over the ATM GFR service

The ATM guaranteed frame rate (GFR) service is intended for best effort traffic that can benefit from minimum throughput guarantees. Edge devices connecting LANs to an ATM network can use GFR to transport multiple TCP/IP connections over a single GFR VC. These devices would typically multiplex VCs into a single FIFO queue. It has been shown that in general, FIFO queuing is not sufficient to provide rate guarantees, and per-VC queuing with scheduling is needed. We show that under conditions of low buffer allocation, it is possible to control TCP rates with FIFO queuing and buffer management. We present analysis and simulation results on controlling TCP rates by buffer management. We present a buffer management policy that provides loose rate guarantees to SACK TCP sources when the total buffer allocation is low. We study the performance of this buffer management scheme by simulation.