Vandalore B., Providing Rate Guarantees to TCP over the ATM GFR

The ATM Guaranteed Frame Rate (GFR) service is intended for best eort trac that can benet from minimum throughput guarantees. Edge devices con-necting LANs to an ATM network can use GFR to transport multiple TCP/IP connections over a single GFR VC. These devices would typically multiplex VCs into a single FIFO queue. It has been shown that in general, FIFO queuing is not sucient to provide rate guarantees, and per-VC queuing with scheduling is needed. We show that under conditions of low buer al-location, it is possible to control TCP rates with FIFO queuing and buer management. We present analy-sis and simulation results on controlling TCP rates by buer management. We present a buer management policy that provides loose rate guarantees to SACK TCP sources when the total buer allocation is low. We study the performance of this buer management scheme by simulation