Congestion control for real-time traffic in high-speed networks

An investigation is conducted of the possibility of locally controlling short-term congestion for loss-tolerant but delay-sensitive traffic (such as packet voice) through selective discarding of packets based on the virtual work found by a packet on arrival to a queue (local deadlines). By analysis and simulation of a multistage virtual circuit, it is shown that this approach can cut voice-tolerable loss rates in half for high loads. It is also shown that the simple case of using the same local deadline throughout the network performs nearly as well as taking reduced interior traffic into consideration and optimizing loss performance over a set of heterogeneous local deadlines. As an example, the issue of establishing control parameters at call-setup time is also considered