TCP explicit congestion notification over ABR and UBR: an agent-based approach

A performance study of the explicit congestion notification (ECN) mechanism in the transmission control protocol (TCP) over ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) networks is presented. TCP´s congestion control is enhanced so that congestion is indicated by not only packet losses as is currently the case but an agent implemented at the ATM network´s edge as well. Our simulation experiments show that TCP ECN achieves: significantly lower cell loss, packet retransmissions, buffer utilisation and exhibits better throughput than (non-ECN) TCP Reno.