Congestion-free communication in broadband packet networks

A congestion control strategy for broadband packet networks is proposed. The strategy is aimed at connection-oriented services and provides congestion-free communications with guaranteed throughput and constant end-to-end delay per connection. It is composed of an admission policy imposed per connection at the source node, and a particular queuing scheme practised at the switching nodes. The admission policy requires the packet stream of each connection to possess a certain smoothness property upon arrival at the network, while the queuing scheme preserves this property as packets travel inside the network. Implementation of this strategy is simple, with little processing overhead and minor hardware modifications to the conventional FIFO (first in, first out) with queuing structure. Uniform application of the strategy to all of the services in a network may result in low transmission utilization. In order to obtain statistical multiplexing gain, less conservative traffic management schemes could be incorporated with the proposed strategy into the same network