Abstract: | The characteristics of TCP and UDP lead to different network transmission behaviours. TCP is responsive to network congestion whereas UDP is not. This paper proposes two mechanisms that operate at the source node to regulate TCP and UDP flows and provide a differential service for them. One is the congestion‐control mechanism, which uses congestion signal detected by TCP flows to regulate the flows at the source node. Another is the time‐slot mechanism, which assigns different number of time slots to flows to control their flow transmission. Based on the priority of each flow, different bandwidth proportions are allocated for each flow and differential services are provided. Simulation results show some insights of these two mechanisms. Moreover, we summarize the factors that may impact the performance of these two mechanisms. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |