ON END SYSTEM BEHAVIOR FOR EXPLICIT FORWARD CONGESTION INDICATION OF ABR SERVICE AND ITS PERFORMANCE

This paper investigates Available Bit Rate (ABR) traffic control based on the Explicit Forward Congestion Indication (EFCI). A flow control mechanism is specified for ABR service to control the source rate. Res ource Management (RM) cells are used to convey feedback. A source send s a forward RM cell for at least every N cells sent. At the destinatio n, a forward RM cell turns around as a backward RM cell and returns to the source. A data cell has EFCI-bit in its header field. A network e lement sets EFCI-bit if it is congested. A destination indicates conge stion status of networks by using RM cells based on the value of the E FCI-bit of the data cells. A one-bit feedback scheme is used by the AT M Forum. However, indication schemes have also been proposed which use explicit indication of source rate based both on values of the EFCI-b it of data cells and on other information contained in a forward RM ce ll. We evaluated explicit indication schemes as well as a one-bit sche me by simulation. Simulation study showed explicit cell rate indicatio n gives superior performance than one-bit indication especially for lo ng round trip distances. In this paper, we report the results with bri ef discussion.