Robust control and rate coordination for efficiency and fairness in ABR traffic with explicit rate marking

✍ Scribed by L. Schwiebert; L.Y. Wang

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 198 KB
• Volume: 24
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0140-3664
• DOI: 10.1016/s0140-3664(01)00287-0

✦ Synopsis

The problem of ef®ciency and fairness of Available Bit Rate (ABR) traf®c with Explicit Rate (ER) marking is investigated from a control point of view. It is revealed that due to signi®cant uncertainty on time delays in ABR traf®c and strong interaction among switches, ABR traf®c imposes a great challenge to control strategy development. Focusing on robustness of congestion control and asymptotic fairness, we propose a new control strategy that employs robust control to accommodate delay uncertainty and rate coordination for fairness. Interaction between these two control actions leads to a non-standard multi-objective control problem. Overall stability of the system and convergence to fairness are rigorously analyzed. Conditions are presented under which robust stability and convergence are guaranteed. Simulation tests are then performed to demonstrate that a redesign of feedback controllers may become necessary to satisfy these conditions.