Saturated Controller Design of an ABR Explicit Rate Algorithm for ATM Switches

The transmission of multimedia traffic on the broadband integrated service digital networks (B-ISDN) has created the need for new transport technologies such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). Briefly, because of the variability of the multimedia traffic, ATM networks seek to guarantee an end-to-end quality of service (QoS) by dividing the varying types of traffic (voice, data, etc.) into short, fixed-size cells (53 bytes each) whose transmission delay may be predicted and controlled. ATM is thus a Virtual Circuit (VC) technology which combines advantages of circuit-switching (all intermediate switches are alerted of the transmission requirements, and a connecting circuit is established) and packet-switching (many circuits can share the network resources). In order for the various VC's to share network resources, flow and congestion control algorithms need to be designed and implemented. The congestion control problem is solved by regulating the input traffic rate. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.