Phantom: A Simple and Effective Flow Control Scheme

This paper presents Phantom, a simple constant space algorithm for rate based flow control. As shown by our simulations, it converges fast to a fair rate allocation while generating a moderate queue length. While our approach can be easily implemented in ATM switches for managing ABR traffic, it is also suitable for flow control in TCP router based networks. Both the introduced overhead and the required modifications in TCP flow control systems are minimal. The implementation of this approach in TCP guarantees fairness and provides a unifying interconnection between TCP routers and ATM networks. The new algorithm easily inter-operates with current TCP flow control mechanisms and thus can be gradually introduced into installed based TCP networks. 1 Introduction A major goal of network protocols is to maximize the utilization of the network resources (e.g., bandwidth) while sharing the resources in a fair way among the users/applications. Flow control is the mechanism that controls the ..