Impacts of fast congestion notification function on multicast ABR branch point switch in ATM networks

This paper investigates the impacts of the fast congestion notification function on branch point switch algorithms for multicast (or point-to-multipoint) available bit rate (ABR) flow control in ATM networks. A new backward resource management (BRM) cell-discarding policy is proposed which controls additional BRM cell overhead due to fast congestion notification. The performance of branch-point algorithms with the proposed fast congestion notification is also compared using simulations. The simulation results show that a fast congestion notification is very effective in a severe overload situation, particularly in an initial period with a higher initial cell rate. The fast congestion notification can be also combined with any branch point algorithm. However, its performance is highly dependent on the underlying basic branch point algorithm employed