Design and Evaluation of an Intelligent Rate Controller for Heterogeneous Networks

This paper proposes an intelligent rate controller for the Internet traffic. Called the IntelRate (Intelligent Rate), it is a router-based controller and uses the fuzzy logic control approach to adjust the source sending rate based on the instantaneous queue size of the router. Unlike other explicit congestion control protocols, the IntelRate controller need not evaluate the link states (such as bottleneck bandwidth or the number of flows in the link) while performing well to the sudden changes in traffic load or bandwidth. Simulation results and comparisons have verified the effectiveness of our scheme, and showed the IntelRate controller is more stable and robust upon large network changes than other existing protocols that rely on the estimation of available bandwidth in order to compute the admissible source sending rate.