Reliable Transmission in Flow-Aware Networks

A complete system which ensures reliable transmission of streaming flows in flow-aware networks (FAN) is presented and analyzed in the paper. A new congestion control mechanism, called RPAEF (remove and prioritize in access active elastic flows), is described in detail. It allows for fast acceptance of new streaming flows in the admission control (AC) block of FAN routers. The mechanism of limiting the number of new flows accepted in the AC block is provided as an answer to the scalability problem of all congestion control mechanisms proposed for FAN up to now. The global list of protected flows ensures that all streaming flows redirected from the primary route in case of a network element failure are immediately accepted in the first router on a backup route. The advantages and weaknesses of the proposed solutions are described and analyzed. Moreover, it is shown that the simultaneous implementation of all of them ensures fast, scalable and reliable transmission of streaming flows in FAN.