ABR Rate Control for Multimedia Traffic Using Microeconomics

Multimedia applications are expected to play a more prevalent role in integrated service networks. One method of efficiently transmitting such traffic uses the ABR service class. However, rate control for this class becomes more difficult due to the bursty and somewhat unpredictable behavior of multimedia traffic. This paper presents a microeconomic-based ABR rate control technique that models the network as competitive markets. Prices are affixed to ABR bandwidth based upon supply and demand, and users purchase bandwidth to maximize their individual QoS. This yields a state-less rate control method that provides Pareto-optimal and QoS-fair bandwidth distributions, as well as high utilization. Simulation results using actual MPEG-compressed video traffic show utilization over 95% and better QoS control than max-min or demand-based weighted max-min.