A Nonlinear Flow Control Scheme Under Capacity Constraints

We present a nonlinear flow control scheme based on a buffer management model with physical constraints. It extends previous result of Pitsillides et al. in [6] by improving the queue length regulation for better service of network traffics. Besides a single node system, we also address the decentralized control of many cascaded nodes. The proposed discontinuous controller asymptotically regulates the buffer queue length at the output port of a router/switch to a constant reference value, under unknown time varying interfering traffics and saturation constraints on control input and states. Its continuous approximation achieves practical regulation with an ultimate bound on the regulation error tunable by a design parameter.