BANDWIDTH MANAGEMENT AND CONGESTION CONTROL FRAMEWORK OF THE BROAD-BAND NETWORK ARCHITECTURE

In this paper we describe an integrated set of procedures for bandwidth management and congestion control in IBM's broadband network architecture for high speed networks. These controls operate at two different time scales, at the connection level and at the packet or cell level. Major connection level controls are path selection, admission control and bandwidth allocation. These controls are applied at the connection setup time and are based on the connection characterization and the network state at that time. Packet level controls are access control, traffic monitoring and intermediate node buffer management. Because of their smaller time scale, they do not rely on any feedback information from the network. The main focus of this paper is to reconcile the different time scales of these controls, and define how they interplay to ensure proper network operation. The ideas presented in this paper are being implemented and deployed in several test-beds and field trials for experimental validation.