Dynamic Window Flow Control on a High-Speed Wide-Area Data Network

Abstract This paper considers sliding-window flow control for data traffic on a high-speed, wide-area, virtual-circuit backbone network. The objectives are to allocate network bandwidth fairly, to utilize bandwidth efficiently, and to prevent buffer overflow within the network, but without requiring gross overengineering of memory in the switching nodes. The network uses round robin queueing disciplines at routers and switches. A signaling protocol is described for in-call adjustment of windows and per-virtual-circuit buffer allocations as a function of network congestion, while maintaining consistent allocations along each virtual circuit. Simulations indicate that the protocol works as expected between the edges of the wide-area network. The wide-area backbone may interconnect local-area networks on which the hosts use transport-level protocols such as TCP. The backbone network protocol works satisfactorily with the host-to-host transport provided that the hosts use a retransmission strategy such as Jacobson-Karels to deal with possible packet losses at the edge of the backbone network.