A Two-Level Flow Control Scheme for High Speed Networks

New applications such as multimedia remote conferencing demand network transport services with performance guarantees. At the same time, new networking technologies such as ATM are gearing towards providing services on a reservation-and-guarantee basis. In the light of the new application and networking environments, it seems necessary to revisit many of the transport protocol issues in search for more efficient ways to address them. This paper proposes using an explicit rate control together with a simple window control for flow control in high-speed networks with resource reservations. The design justifications, the evaluation study, and the implementation results are presented. Particularly, the idea of hard ACK and soft ACK in the context of end-to-end flow control is explored through simulation and the results are discussed.