Robust Rate Control for ABR Sources

The paper considers the design of explicit ratebased flow control for ABR sources in an ATM network. The goal is to share the available capacity “fairly” among many sources while maintaining queue length at a bottleneck node at a desired level. This problem is formulated as a stochastic control problem, and in this framework rate-control mechanisms are developed, which stabilize the queue length even thou,gh different sources may have different round-trip delays to the bottleneck node. Various robustness properties of the solution are illustrated through simulation experiments. Keywords— ATM, ABR, Rate Control, Team Theory, Stochastic Control