An optimal flow control algorithm for real-time traffic over the Internet

According to the Wide Area Network model and queue dynamics in the router, the authors formulate the Internet flow control as a constrained convex programming problem, where the objective is to maximize the total utility and minimize transmission delay and delay jitter of all sources over their transmission rates. Based on this formulation, flow control can be solved by means of a gradient projection algorithm with properly rate iterations. The main difficulty facing the realization of the iteration algorithm is the distributed computation of the congestion measure. Fortunately, Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) is likely to be used to improving the performance of TCP in the near future. By using ECN, it is possible to realize the iteration algorithm in IP networks. The algorithm is divided into two parts, algorithms in the router and the source. The main advantage of the scheme is its fast convergence ability and robustness, but small queue length fluctuation is unavoidable when the number of users increases.