Ping-pong flow control for ATM ABR traffic

In this paper, we propose an improved technique for congestion control, named as ping-pong flow control (PPFC), for asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) available bit rate (ABR) traffic. This is a rate-based flow control scheme, in which the rate regulation is achieved by directly adjusting the transmission rate in the source end station. The proposed algorithm uses a bipolar feedback strategy, which employs positive and negative feedbacks to control the transmission rate for different switch states. These states are determined using the traditional threshold-based method. We also introduce state early detection (SED), which enables the PPFC to control traffic flows more precisely and accurately at critical moments. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm provides a higher throughput and lower cell loss ratio when compared to the well-known backward explicit congestion notification (BECN). Furthermore, these results also show that PPFC is robust against feedback losses.