Congestion control system and method for packet switched networks providing max-min fairness

摘要

A method is disclosed for rate allocation within the individual switches of a communications network implementing a rate-based congestion control approach for best-effort traffic. The methodology of the invention centers on a new rate allocation algorithm which performs its allocation functions independently of the number of connections sharing a network link and therefore performs an allocation in Θ(1) time. With that implementation simplicity, the algorithm is particularly advantageous for implementation in ATM switches carrying a large number of virtual channels. The algorithm operates on bandwidth information supplied from the source of a connection in special cells or packet headers, such as ATM Resource Management cells. By storing parameter values for other connections sharing a network link, the algorithm requires a constant number of simple computations for each request from a connection for a bandwidth allocation. The algorithm is asynchronous and distributed in nature and converges to the max-min fairness allocation. G60