Performance analysis of reactive congestion control for ATM networks

In ATM networks, preventive congestion control is widely recognized for efficiently avoiding congestion, and it is implemented by a conjunction of connection admission control and usage parameter control. However, congestion may still occur because of unpredictable statistical fluctuation of traffic sources even when preventive control is performed in the network. The authors study another kind of congestion control, i.e., reactive congestion control, in which each source changes its cell emitting rate adaptively to the traffic load at the switching node (or at the multiplexer). The intention is that, by incorporating such a congestion control method in ATM networks, more efficient congestion control is established. They develop an analytical model, and carry out an approximate analysis of reactive congestion control algorithm. Numerical results show that the reactive congestion control algorithms are very effective in avoiding congestion and in achieving the statistical gain. Furthermore, the binary congestion control algorithm with push-out mechanism is shown to provide the best performance among the reactive congestion control algorithms treated