Dynamic pause time calculation method in MAC layer flow control

Temporary traffic congestion causes packet losses. If the losses due to the temporary congestion can be avoided, the utilization of network resource will be improved. Also, the network applications and techniques using the control packets increase with the development of the broadband Internet. Therefore, it is important to restrain the increased congestion due to the control packets overhead. IEEE 802.3x flow control defines a pause frame and can designate pause time in it. When the frame is sent to the devices sending packets, it is possible to stop sending them in the given pause time. Thus it can avoid packet losses caused by buffer overflows due to the temporary traffic congestion. This paper focuses on this flow control and proposes the dynamic pause time calculation scheme. The proposed scheme calculates and changes the pause time according to the network congestion. The performance evaluations of the proposed method show it avoids packet losses due to buffer overflows and achieves a maximum of about 70% reduction of the control packets compared to the conventional method.