A novel approach to congestion control in ATM wide area networks

This paper proposes input buffering of controllable traffic as a simple and effective solution for congestion control in ATM WANs. ERICA and adaptive stochastic (AS) flow control schemes are used for comparing two network configurations: network "A"-where feedback messages travel to each individual source and network "B"-where feedback messages are sent from the output port to the input buffer of the switch where the total lower priority; i.e., controllable traffic, is queued. The requirements tested include queue size, queuing delay, queuing delay variance, and utilization. The results indicate that network "B", due to its insensitivity to lengths of links, manifested superior performance.