Integration of high speed continuous stream data traffic in a broadband packet network

With the advent of high-speed networks, there has been a tendency to simplify flow/congestion control functions at lower levels of the OSI model and relegate them to higher levels. This paper shows that a class of traffic, namely host-to-host file transfers, can experience severe degradation in performance due to lack of proper control in such networks. A simple distributed rate-based flow control scheme is proposed which solves the problem without affecting the performance of the network. The scheme is easily implemented, with control totally distributed and managed by the sources. The rate is negotiated at call setup time and entails very little overhead. A detailed simulation model is built to quantify the problems and verify the solution