Stability and performance analysis of rate-based feedback flow controlled ATM networks

Motivated by ABR class of service in ATM networks, we study a continuous ti me queueing system with a feedback control of the arrival rate of some of t he sources. The feedback about the queue length or the total workload is pr ovided at regular intervals (variations on it, especially the traffic manag ement specification TM 4.0, are also considered). The propagation delays ca n be nonnegligible. For a general class of feedback algorithms, we obtain t he stability of the system in the presence of one or more bottleneck nodes in the virtual circuit. Our system is general enough that it can be useful to study feedback control in other network protocols. We also obtain rates of convergence to the stationary distributions and finiteness of moments. F or the single botterneck case, we provide algorithms to compute the station ary distributions and the moments of the sojourn times in different sets of states. We also show analytically (by showing continuity of stationary dis tributions and moments) that for small propagation delays, we can provide f eedback algorithms which have higher mean throughput, lower probability of overflow and lower delay jitter than any open loop policy. Finally these re sults are supplemented by some computational results.