Analysis of a credit manager for traffic regulation in a high speed network system with finite buffer

Abstract

We investigate a high speed network system with finite buffer subject to flow control by a credit manager. The main purpose of the credit manager is to smooth out the burstiness of the input process, thereby making it easier for the network to handle large amount of data without undue delays, congestion or buffer overflow. We model the system as a quasi-birth-death (QBD) process for which the steady state distribution is obtained by using the folding algorithm. From the steady state distribution of the QBD process, we determine the queue length distribution and the average sojourn time of the packets. The characteristics of such system are investigated and the optimum buffer size can be obtained in the analysis.<>