Outline

What is Congestion? Factors that cause Congestion. Congestion Control Mechanisms and Policies. Congestion Prevention Policies. Congestion Control In Virtual Circuits. Congestion Control Taxonomy.

An important issue in a packet-switched network is congestion. Congestion in a network may occur if the load on the network the number of packets sent to the network is greater than the capacity of the network the number of packets a network can handle. Congestion control refers to the mechanisms and techniques to control the congestion and keep the load below the capacity. Main reason of congestion is more number of packets into the network than it can handle.

Packet arrival rate exceeds the outgoing link capacity. Insufficient memory to store arriving packets

Bursty traffic Slow processor

Congestion control refers to the mechanisms and techniques used to control congestion and keep the traffic below the capacity of the network. Congestion control techniques can be broadly classified two broad categories: Open loop: Protocols to prevent or avoid congestion, ensuring that the system (or network under consideration) never enters a Congested State. Close loop: Protocols that allow system to enter congested state, detect it, and remove it

Open Loop Good design. Static in nature. Decision are made without taking into consideration the current state of the network.

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Close Loop Based on concept of feedback. Dynamic in nature. Divided into 3 steps: Detect congestion. Pass information to the place where action could be taken. Make operations to correct problem.

Congestion Control
Open Loop Closed Loop

Retransmission Policy

Back Pressure

Window Policy

Choke Packet

Acknowledgement Policy

Implicit Signalling

Discarding Policy Explicit Signalling Admission Policy

Retransmission Policy

Retransmission is sometime unavoidable. If the sender feels that a sent packet is lost or corrupted, the packet needs to be transmitted. Retransmission may increase congestion in the network.

Window Policy

Policy that the window is using for transmission of data. Go-Back-N. Selective repeat window.

Acknowledgement Policy The ACK policy imposed by the receiver may also affect congestion. If the receiver does not ACK every packet it receives, it may slow down the sender and help prevent congestion. Several approaches are used in this case. A receiver may send an ACK only if it has a packet to be sent or a special timer expires. A receiver may decide to ACK only N packet at a time. Sending fewer ACK means imposing less load on network.

Discarding Policy A good discarding policy by the routers may prevent congestion and at the same time may not hard the integrity of the transmission. Packet lifetime management deals with how long a packet may live before being discarded. Admission Policy An admission policy, which is a quality-of-service mechanism, can also prevent congestion in virtual circuit networks. Switches in a flow first check the resource requirement of a flow before admitting it to the network. A router can deny establishing a virtual circuit connection if there is congestion in the network or if there is a possibility of future congestion.

Back Pressure It is a node-to-node congestion control mechanism in which a congested node stops receiving data from the immediate upstream node. It can only be applied to virtual circuit network, as upstream node are known here. Propagates in opposite direction of data flow.

Choke Packets A more direct way of telling the source to slow down. A choke packet is a control packet generated at a congested node and transmitted to restrict traffic flow. The source, on receiving the choke packet must reduce its transmission rate by a certain percentage. Choke packet scheme is a close loop mechanism where each link is monitored to examine how much utilization is taking place. If the utilization goes beyond a certain threshold limit, the link goes to a warning and a special packet, called choke packet is sent to the source. On receiving the choke packet, the source reduced the traffic in order to avoid congestion.

Implicit Signaling There is no communication between the congested node and the source. The source guesses that there is a congestion somewhere in the network from other symptoms and slow down itself. Ex:- No ACK received or delay in receiving ACK
Explicit Signaling Occur in either forward or backward direction Backward Signaling:- A bit can be set in a packet moving in the direction opposite to the congestion. This bit can warn the source that there is congestion and that it needs to slow down. Forward Signaling:- A bit can be set in a packet moving in the direction of the congestion. This bit can warn the destination that there is a congestion. Receiver can slow down the ACK.

The basic principle is obvious: When setting up a virtual circuit, make sure that congestion can be avoided. Admission control: Once congestion has been signaled, no more new virtual circuits can be set up until the problem has gone away. Select alternative routes to avoid part of the network that is overloaded, i.e. temporarily rebuild your view of network. Negotiate quality of connection in advance, so that network provider can reserve buffers and other resources, guaranteed to be there

Router-Centric

The internal network routers take responsibility for:

Which packets to forward Which packets to drop or mark The nature of congestion notification to the hosts.

Host-Centric

The end hosts adjust their behavior based on observations of network conditions. (e.g., TCP Congestion Control Mechanisms)

Reservation-Based the hosts attempt to reserve network capacity when the flow is established.
The routers allocate resources to satisfy reservations or the flow is rejected. The reservation can be receiver-based (e.g., RSVP) or sender-based. Window-Based - The receiver sends an advertised window to the sender or a window advertisement can be used to reserve buffer space in routers.

Rate-Based The senders rate is controlled by the

receiver indicating the bits per second it can absorb.

Feedback-Based - The transmission rate is adjusted (via window size) according to feedback received from the sub network. Explicit feedback FECN, BECN, ECN Implicit feedback router packet drops.