Nonlinear flow control for network traffic management with capacity constraints

We present our nonlinear flow control schemes based on a buffer management model with physical constraints. It extends the previous result of A. Pitsillides, P. Ioannou and L. Rossides (2001) by improving the buffer management of a network to better serve a class of traffic. Extension to decentralized control of a large scale network is also considered. The proposed discontinuous controller asymptotically regulates the buffer queue length at the output port of a router/switch to a constant value, in the face of unknown interfering traffics and control input constraint. Its continuous approximation achieves practical regulation with an ultimate bound on the regulation error tunable by a design parameter.