End-to-End Congestion Control of High-Speed Gigabit-Ethernet Networks based on Smith's Principle

Nowadays, the issue of congestion control in high-speed communication networks becomes critical in view of the bandwidth-delay products for efficient data flow. In particular, the fact that the congestion is often accompanied by the data flow from the high-speed link to low-speed link is important with respect to the stability of closed-loop congestion control. The Virtual-Connection Network (VCN) in Gigabit Ethernet networks is a packet-switching based network capable of implementing cell- based connection, link-by-link flow-controlled connection, and single- or multi-destination virtual connections. VCN described herein differ from the virtual channel in ATM literature in that VCN have link-by-link flow control and can be of multi-destination. VCNs support both connection-oriented and connectionless data link layer traffic. Therefore, the worst collision scenario in Ethernet CSMA/CD with virtual collision brings about end-to-end delay. Gigabit Ethernet networks based on CSMA/CD results in non-deterministic behavior because its media access rules are based on random probability. Hence, it is difficult to obtain any sound mathematical formulation for congestion control without employing random processes or fluid-flow models. In this paper, an analytical method for the design of a congestion control scheme is proposed based on Smith＇s principle to overcome instability accompanied with the increase of end-to-end delays as well as to avoid cell losses. To this end, mathematical analysis is provided such that the proposed control scheme guarantees the performance improvement with respect to bandwidth and latency for selected network links with different propagation delays. In addition, guaranteed bandwidth is to be implemented by allowing individual stations to burst several frames at a time without intervening round-trip idle time.