An optimal rate control algorithm for guaranteed services in broadband networks

Abstract Rate control is a known technique for preventing congestion in multi-service networks. Among the proposed control schemes, the connection bit rate can be modified in order to conform with a given “Leaky Bucket”. In this paper, we present a new algorithm for rate control that satisfies the Leaky Bucket constraints. In the proposed algorithm, the bit rate is controlled in order to minimize a cost function defined as a linear combination of two terms related to the difference between the original and the controlled bit rate and to the content of the token buffer, respectively. The obtained solution has some interesting mathematical properties. Moreover, a sub-optimal solution is proposed that is very close to the optimal one and is interesting for practical purposes. In fact it turns out to be a linear combination, with constant coefficients, of few samples of the original sequence. Numerical results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.