A Temporal-Spatial Flow Control Protocol for ABR in Integrated Networks

Many end-to-end feedback flow control protocols experience the rate oscillations caused by latency phase shift (LPS). This problem comes from time-varying bandwidth and non-zero feedback latency. A temporal flow control (TFC) protocol called MTS (Multiple-Time-Scale) was proposed to significantly reduce the oscillations in our earlier publication [2]. In this paper, the class of temporal flow control is further studied and a fundamental theorem relating LPS rate oscillations to the ratio of feedback latency to available bandwidth window duration is proved. The MTS protocol is generalized and two propositions showing the advantages of the generic MTS protocol is proved. Simulation results show MTS significantly improves network performance in terms of stability, throughput and cell loss. In particular, MTS smoothens the output traffic very effectively, thus further reducing the traffic fluctuations.