A proposal for binary congestion control with rate-based sources and stateless routers

Abstract

The paper presents new algorithms for rate-based congestion control. The network congestion status is made available to the sources by explicit binary notifications generated in the core nodes. Besides the associated control bandwidth reduction, binary notifications enable a simple implementation in heterogeneous network environments where switches/routers use different congestion control strategies. The source algorithm is adaptive and shows significant improvement on the level of oscillations as compared to classical binary schemes, e.g. multiplicative decrease/additive increase. An algorithm for the core routers is also proposed that achieves a max-min fair-share allocation of bandwidth without requiring the memorization of per-flow data. The simulation results presented show a good performance of the algorithms both for homogeneous (Internet) and heterogeneous (Internet/ATM) network environments.