Stratacom, Inc.

Lionel A Bustini

Charles Matthew Corbalis

Patrick D Daley

A feedback control system for congestion prevention in a cell (packet) switching communication network is described. Congestion control is accomplished by controlling the transmission rate of bursty traffic in the presence of high priority, voice, low speed statistical, high speed deterministic and multicast data. Because bursty traffic is relatively insensitive to delay, adequate buffer capacity can be provided at the network nodes in order to minimize bursty data cell loss. By monitoring the buffer queue lengths at the nodes, a control signal can be generated at each intermediate node indicating the state of congestion. Excess queue length indicates incipient congestion while short queue lengths indicate excess capacity. Queue status is forwarded to the destination node where it is interpreted and sent back to the source node as a feedback rate control signal using a 2-bit code. The source node regulates the rate of bursty data transmission over the cell network in accordance with the feedback control signal thus minimizing congestion and concomitant data loss while efficiently utilizing available network bandwidth.

Congestion control for cell networks

A method of fair queuing and servicing cell traffic in a telecommunication node which interfaces with a telecommunication system including a multiplicity of nodes is described. The steps include placing cells of traffic are placed in a queue according to a hopcount associated with each cell of bursty traffic, the hopcount being representative of the number of nodes traversed by the associated cell. Cells of traffic within the queue are serviced according to their associated hopcount. The hopcount associated with each cell of traffic is incremented as each cell of traffic is serviced. Circuitry providing fair queuing and servicing of cell traffic in a telecommunication node which interfaces with a telecommunication system including a multiplicity of nodes is also described.

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Campbell, CA, United States of America

Lionel A Bustini