A FRAMING STRATEGY FOR CONGESTION MANAGEMENT

A congestion management strategy for integrated services packet networks is proposed, which is robust with regard to transmission speed and network size. The strategy supports several classes of services with zero loss and different delay bounds as well as services without stringent loss and delay guarantees. Loss-free and bounded-delay transmission is accomplished by means of an admission policy which ensures smoothness of the traffic at the network edge, and a service discipline called stop-and-go queueing, which maintains the traffic smoothness throughout the network. Both the admission policy and the stop-and-go queueing are based on a time framing concept, addressed in a previous paper. This concept is further developed here to incorporate several frame sizes into the strategy, thereby providing flexibility in meeting throughput and delay requirements of different applications. Stop-and-go queueing is realizable with minor modification to a FIFO queueing structure. Zero-loss and bounded-delay properties of the strategy are proved for arbitrary network topology and transmission speed.