A unifying passivity framework for network flow control

Network flow control regulates the traffic between sources and links based on congestion, and plays a critical role in ensuring satisfactory performance. In recent studies, global stability has been shown for several flow control schemes. By using a passivity approach, this paper presents a unifying framework which encompasses these stability results as special cases. In addition, the new approach significantly expands the current classes of stable flow controllers by augmenting the source and link update laws with passive dynamic systems. This generality offers the possibility of optimizing the controllers, for example, to improve robustness in stability and performance with respect to time delays, unmodeled flows, and capacity variation.