Meeting the challenge: congestion and flow control strategies for broadband information transport

Determining approaches to congestion and flow control, especially real-time components in an overall strategy, is recognized as one of the fundamental challenges facing broadband packet-based information transport, e.g. in the case of B-ISDN/ATM (broadband integrated services digital network/asynchronous transfer mode). Basic issues underlying this subject are summarized and a particular approach to achieving a broadband congestion-, flow-, and error control architecture, based on a core congestion-control strategy called bandwidth management, is described. The modular and layered nature of this control architecture is described and shown to lend itself to a structured approach to characterizing the control architecture performance.<>