5/13/2021

Congestion Control Algorithms

• Approaches to Congestion Control
• Traffic-Aware Routing
• Admission Control
The Network Layer • Traffic Throttling
Congestion Control Algorithms & • Load Shedding
Quality-of-Service

Congestion General Principles of Congestion Control

1. Monitor the system

– detect when and where congestion occurs.
2. Pass information to where action can be taken.
3. Adjust system operation to correct the problem.

4. Difference between Congestion control and

flow control – Elaborate
When too much traffic is offered, congestion sets in and 5. Problem of infinite buffer - Elaborate
performance degrades sharply.

Approaches to Congestion Control Traffic-Aware Routing

Two solutions possible:
1)Increase resources
2)Decrease load

Admission control in virtual networks – no more provisioning

A network in which the East and West parts
are connected by two links.

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Admission Control Traffic Throttling:Congestion Detection

• Routers must determine when congestion is approaching, ideally
before it has arrived.
• Each router can continuously monitor the resources it is using.
• 3 possibilities:
1. utilization of the output links
2. buffering of queued packets inside the router (most useful)
3. no. of packets that are lost due to insufficient buffering

EWMA (Exponentially Weighted Moving Average)

(a) A congested network. (b) The portion of the network that is • dnew = αdold + (1 − α)s,
not congested. A virtual circuit from A to B is also shown. where, the constant α determines how fast the router forgets
recent history.
Problem is in virtual circuits – there may be provisioning but not
real usage. • Whenever d moves above the threshold, the router notes the
onset of congestion.

Traffic Throttling: Feedback

• Routers must deliver timely feedback to the senders that are
Mechanisms 2 & 3:
causing the congestion. Direct Choke Packets,
• The router must identify the appropriate senders. Hop-by-Hop Backpressure
• It must then warn them carefully, without sending many more
packets into the already congested network.
M-2: A choke packet that
affects only the source.
• Many feedback mechanisms:
M-3: A choke packet that
Mechanism 1: Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) affects each hop it passes
through.
Sending choke packets to the
source may be costly.

Mechanism 4: Load Shedding Mechanism 5: Random Early Detection

• Performed when all other strategies fail. • Discard packets before all the buffer space is really
• Cause blackout in some areas to save the entire exhausted.
network from failing. • To determine when to start discarding, routers
• Intelligent packet drop policy desired. maintain a running average of their queue lengths.
• Which packets to discard may depend on application • When average queue length exceeds a threshold, the
Multimedia – old packets (full frame not to be link is said to be congested – small fraction of packets
discarded) dropped at random.
Text – Recent Packets • The affected sender will notice the loss when there is
• Packet’s importance can be marked in the beginning no acknowledgement – transport protocol slowed
(application layer), then decision on which packets down.
to discard can be taken.

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Quality of Service Requirements

• Requirements
5-30
• Minimum throughput and maximum latency
• Techniques for Achieving Good Quality of Service
• Integrated Services
• Differentiated Services
• Label Switching and MPLS

How stringent the quality-of-service requirements are.

Jitter Control
Categories of QoS and Examples
1. Constant bit rate
• Telephony
2. Real-time variable bit rate
• Compressed videoconferencing
3. Non-real-time variable bit rate
• Watching a movie on demand
Schedule Delay according to Deadline Miss
4. Available bit rate
• File transfer (a) High jitter. (b) Low jitter.

Buffering Traffic Shaping

• Traffic in data networks is bursty – typically arrives
at non-uniform rates as the traffic rate varies.
• Traffic shaping is a technique for regulating the
average rate and burstiness of a flow of data that
enters the network.
• When a flow is set up, the user and the network
agree on a certain traffic pattern (shape).
• Sometimes this agreement is called an SLA
(Service Level Agreement).
Smoothing the output stream by buffering packets.

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The Leaky Bucket Algorithm The Token Bucket Algorithm

5-34

(a) A leaky bucket with water. (b) a leaky bucket with packets.
(a) Before. (b) After.

Token Bucket Algorithm (2) Traffic Shaping (2)

• Burst length – S sec.
• Maximum output rate – M bytes/sec
• Token bucket capacity – B bytes
• Token arrival rate – R bytes/sec

• An output burst contains a maximum of (B + RS) bytes.

• The number of bytes in a maximum speed burst of length
S seconds is MS.
• Hence, we have: B + RS = MS
• This equation can be solved to get S = B /(M − R)
(a) Traffic from a host. Output shaped by a token bucket of rate 200
Mbps and capacity (b) 9600 KB, (c) 0 KB.

Traffic Shaping (3) Packet Scheduling

Kinds of resources that can potentially be
reserved for different flows:

1. Bandwidth.
2. Buffer space.
3. CPU cycles.

Token bucket level for shaping with rate 200 Mbps and capacity (d)
16000 KB, (e) 9600 KB, and (f) 0KB..

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Packet Scheduling (2) Packet Scheduling (3)

(a) Weighted Fair Queueing.

(b) Finishing times for the packets.

Round-robin Fair Queuing

Admission Control (1)

An example flow specification a) T = 1/\mu X 1/(1-\lambda/\mu) -- \lambda = 0.95Mpackets/sec

b) \mu = 1Mb packets/sec

Integrated Services:
Admission Control (2) RSVP—The Resource reSerVation Protocol

Bandwidth and delay guarantees with token buckets and WFQ.

(a) A network. (b) The multicast spanning tree for host 1.
(c) The multicast spanning tree for host 2.

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RSVP (2)
Hosts 1 and 2 are multicast sender

3,4, 5 are multicast receiver

Host 3 reserves for Host 1 and the Host 2

Host 5 reserves Host 1 (so the common path is utilized). However

depending on need (Host 5 may be a bigger TV) – provision is made for
the greediest part

(a) Host 3 requests a channel to host 1. (b) Host 3 then requests a

second channel, to host 2.
(c) Host 5 requests a channel to host 1.

Differentiated Services:
Expedited Forwarding Class-Based Service
Per Hop Behaviors
Traffic within a class are given preferential treatment

Expedited Forwarding
Packets marked – Regular or Expedited

Assured Forwarding
Gold, Silver, Bronze, common
Packets that face congestion
low (short burst), medium and high _ this classes are determined
Expedited packets experience a traffic-free network by tocken bucket algorithm

Differentiated Services:
Assured Forwarding The Leaky
Bucket
Algorithm
(a) Input to a leaky bucket.
(b) Output from a leaky
bucket. Output from a token
bucket with capacities of (c)
250 KB, (d) 500 KB, (e)
750 KB, (f) Output from a
500KB token bucket feeding
A possible implementation of assured forwarding, weighted fair a 10-MB/sec leaky bucket.
scheduling, RED (randome Early Detection discards packet
according to the class).