Performance and Robustness Testing of Explicit-Rate ABR Flow Control Schemes

The objective of this paper is to compare and evaluate three candidate ABR flow control strategies (ERICA, ERICA+, and DEBRA) for ATM networks, using simulation. A set of benchmark network scenarios is proposed and used to illustrate various properties of each algorithm, such as efficiency, fairness, responsiveness, and scalability, as well as robustness in the presence of uncooperative sources. The simulation results show that ERICA+ and DEBRA perform similarly on most scenarios, and slightly better than ERICA, while DEBRA is more robust than ERICA and ERICA+. Overall, the study shows that DEBRA, a new explicit-rate flow control strategy, shows good potential for ABR traffic control in ATM networks. Keywords: Simulation, ABR flow control, ATM networks, performance evaluation 1 Introduction The Available Bit Rate (ABR) traffic class in Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks has generated much discussion and debate within the ATM Forum and beyond [3, 7, 11, 13]. This traffic class..