Receiver-oriented adaptive buffer allocation in credit-based flow control for ATM networks

In credit-based flow control for ATM networks, a buffer is first allocated to each VC (virtual circuit) and then credit control is applied to the VC for avoiding possible buffer overflow. Receiver-oriented, adaptive buffer allocation allows a receiver to allocate its buffer dynamically, to VCs from multiple upstream nodes based on their bandwidth usage. The paper describes, in detail, such an adaptive algorithm capable of supporting a wide range of link speeds and propagation delays, and also packing multiple allocation and credit records in a single message. Analysis and simulation results show that even under highly bursty traffic, the adaptive scheme guarantees no cell loss due to congestion, and achieves excellent performance in utilization, fairness, ramp-up and packing, while requiring only relatively small node memory and bandwidth overhead. The required memory need only be 4*RTT+2*N, where RTT is the link round-trip time in cell cycles and N is the number of VCs.