Myths about Congestion Management in High Speed Networks

Abstract

Weaknesses in several recently proposed ideas about congestion control and avoidance in high-speed netwroks are identified. Both sides of the debate concerning prior reservation of resources versus walk-in service, open-loop control versus feedback control, rate control versus window control, and router-based control versus source-based control are presented. The circumstances under which backpressure is useful or not are discussed, and it is argued that a single congestion scheme is not sufficient, but that a combination of several schemes is required for complete congestion management in a network.