New approach for flow control using PAUSE frame management

Abstract

Day by day Internet communication and services are experiencing an increase in variety and quantity in their capacity and demand. Thus, making traffic management and quality of service approaches for optimization of the Internet become a challenging area of research; meanwhile flow control and congestion control will be considered as significant fundamentals for the traffic control especially on the high speed network (in the range of Gigabit Ethernet family). The existing IEEE802.3x standard which is applicable to all version of full-duplex Ethernet uses PAUSE frames as MAC control frames to enable or disable frame transmission. As a result regulating data flow at the low level of OSI model assists in minimizing frame loss and preventing latency due to error recovery at the higher layer protocols. However some problems encountered; for instance, it does not distinguish the well-behaved stations from misbehaved stations and it causes a head-of-line problem. Moreover, there is no priority awareness all traffic get equal punishment. The adding overhead and other problems associated with IEEE802.3x have made it become inefficient. Realizing the studies to overcome the problems become important has motivated us to propose a new format of PAUSE frame through an intelligent switch, which includes some new flexible programmable fields, such as predetermined pause-time for particular traffics. So our proposed intelligent switches with its new PAUSE frame are able to distinguish between different types of traffic and in turn, both new PAUSE frame and intelligent switch together provide an efficient flow control approach for high speed networks.