Temporal flow control for ABR traffic management in integrated networks

In the integrated networks where real-time traffic coexists with non-real-time traffic, ABR flow control (FC) has to deal with time-varying background traffic. Dynamic changes in available bandwidth (AB) cause rate and queue oscillations, poor utilization, cell loss, extra delay, and jitters. The oscillations are due to slow source response to FC and aggravated by disparity in feedback latencies. We use the multi-time-scale (MTS) approach to differentiate between short and long latency connections so that AB windows are allocated according to latency: dynamically-available bandwidth should be allocated only to those connections that can use it timely. In this paper, we introduce an improved classification scheme to differentiate between short and long latency connections. Extensive simulations show that the MTS protocol significantly improves network performance in terms of queue size, throughput, fairness, and sensitivity to various parameters in the background traffic