Flow control and bandwidth management in next generation Internets

The Internet has traditionally relied on end-to-end congestion control performed at the transport layer, where sources reduce their offered traffic only after congestion sets in. By then, network resources have been wasted and effective throughput compromised. In next generation Internets, the delay-bandwidth product is large and bandwidth is a precious resourse. Hence, in this paper we present a link layer flow control for Internet backbones over ATM using the ABR service and flow control. We describe a backpressure mechanism that reduces packet losses and promotes effective utilization of allocated and unused resources along backbone links. We then show how to perform dynamic renegotiation of allocated backbone resources based on our flow control approach and on class based queueing. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.