A framing strategy for congestion management

Abstract

A congestion management strategy for integrated services packet networks that is robust with regard to transmission speed and network size is proposed. The strategy supports several classes of services with zero loss and different delay bounds as well as services without stringent loss and delay guarantees. Loss-free and bounded-delay transmission is accomplished by means of an admission policy which ensure smoothness of the traffic at the network edge, and by a service discipline called stop-and-go queuing, which maintains the traffic smoothness throughout the network. Both the admission policy and the stop-and-go queuing are based on a time framing concept described elsewhere by the author (IEEE Trans. Commun., vol.39, Dec.1991). This concept is further developed to incorporate several frame sizes into the strategy, thereby providing flexibility in meeting throughput and delay requirements of different applications. Stop-and-go queueing is realizable with minor modification to a first-in first-out (FIFO) queueing structure.