Flow control and congestion avoidance in switched Ethernet LANs

With the increasing popularity of full-duplex, switched Ethernet-a point-to-point technology as opposed to classical CSMA/CD-efforts to standardize a vehicle for flow control at or below the MAC (media access control) sublayer have been initiated. In this paper, the end-to-end transport layer flow control and congestion avoidance mechanisms of TCP, as well as a new hop-by-hop MAC layer flow control being standardized by the IEEE, are considered. Simulation studies are performed to evaluate network performance with and without the explicit congestion indication provided by the MAC layer approach