Adaptive rate control in high-speed networks: performance issues

It is well established that increased network transmission speed reduces th e effectiveness of feedback-based adaptive rate control mechanisms, due to the increased bandwidth propagation delay product. In this environment, dif ferences in the propagation delays associated with the controlled sources b ecome larger when measured in slots (transmission time of information unit) , potentially inducing substantially diversified performance metrics. One o f the objectives in this work is to quantify the potential unfairness as we ll as the reduced effectiveness of this rate control scheme in the presence of non-zero propagation delays. As the network speed increases, it is also expected that traffic sources will seem to be slower due to the relative i ncrease of the information generation time and/or the decrease of the porti on of the bandwidth required by a specific source. The other objective in t his work is to investigate and quantify the expected increased effectivenes s of this rate control scheme in the presence of non-zero propagation delay s as the traffic sources become slower. The studies are carried out by form ulating queuing models and evaluating the per-session cell loss probabiliti es and they are supported by numerical results. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B .V. All rights reserved.