Performance and fairness comparison between EFCI and ERF flow control schemes for the ABR service in ATM networks

In this paper we compare, by simulation based on real traffic traces, the EFCI (explicit forward congestion indication) and the ERF (explicit rate feedback) rate-based flow control algorithms for the available bit rate (ABR) service in ATM networks. The factors under consideration are: (1) distance from source to destination and (2) rate of resource management (RM) cells. Although no significant fairness throughput problem has been identified in both EFCI and ERF, sources with high end-to-end propagation delay will experience higher queueing delay and loss probability. In this paper, we have also shown that although EFCI can lead to considerably lower utilisation than ERF if the parameters are set arbitrarily, it can perform as good as or close to ERF if there were complementary software which can compute the optimal parameters for EFCI based on the on-line measurement of traffic streams.