Performance of end-to-end and gateway-to-gateway flow control procedures in internet environments

A performance comparison between end-to-end flow control (EEFC) and gateway-to-gateway flow control (GGFC) in internet environments is presented. The performance is measured in terms of average delivery delay of packets. First, a new technique for computing the average delivery delay across a network is introduced. It is shown that, for a given input rate to the network, there exists an optimum time-out which minimizes the average delivery delay. Then the performance is evaluated for EEFC and GGFC in an internet environment. It is observed that when the networks are in tandem, GGFC offers a better performance over that of EEFC. However, in general configurations where there is a high degree of traffic bifurcation between the networks, only under adaptive routing does GGFC result in a lower average delivery delay than that of EEFC. Finally, routing and flow control in internets are discussed.