| This dissertation addresses congestion control for explicit rate controlled data networks. Congestion control is a closed-loop technique to regulate the influx of data into a network. In the application considered here, an internal switching node employs congestion control to specify source input rates such that the traffic arriving at the node matches the node's available resources in a fair and efficient manner. Due to the closed-loop and dynamic nature of this problem, adaptive control techniques are utilized extensively. The specific context for this study is the Available Bit Rate (ABR) service category of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks. However, the obtained results apply beyond this specific protocol due to the generality of the derived plant model. It differentiates itself from the other contributions in the area of rate-based congestion control in its balanced approach of retaining enough complexity as to afford attractive, analytically-proven performance properties, but not so much complexity as to make implementation prohibitively expensive. |
