A simple ABR switch algorithm for the weighted max-min fairness policy

An important concept in the ABR service model is the minimum cell rate (MCR) guarantee as well as the peak cell rate (PCR) constraint for each ABR virtual connection. Due to the MCR and PCR requirements, the well-known max-min fairness policy is not sufficient to determine the fair rate allocation in the ABR service model. We present the weighted max-min (WMM) fairness policy, which supports both the MCR and PCR requirements for each ABR virtual connection. A centralized algorithm is presented to compute network-wide bandwidth allocation to achieve this policy. Furthermore, a simple ABR algorithm based on the intelligent marking technique is developed with the aim of achieving the WMM fairness policy in the distributed ABR environment. The effectiveness of our ABR algorithm is demonstrated by simulation results based on the benchmark network configurations suggested by the ATM Forum