The OSU Scheme for Congestion Avoidance in ATM Networks: Lessons Learnt and Extensions

TL;DR

This paper discusses the OSU scheme for ATM network congestion control, highlighting its key features, lessons learned, and three proposed extensions, emphasizing explicit rate feedback and fair, high-utilization operation.

Contribution

It introduces the OSU scheme as an early explicit rate congestion control method and discusses its core features and three significant extensions, advancing ATM network management.

Findings

The OSU scheme uses explicit rate feedback for congestion avoidance.

It maintains high utilization while ensuring fair operation.

Three extensions improve the scheme's performance and applicability.

Abstract

The OSU scheme is a rate-based congestion avoidance scheme for ATM networks using explicit rate indication. This work was one of the first attempts to define explicit rate switch mechanisms and the Resource Management (RM) cell format in Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks. The key features of the scheme include explicit rate feedback, congestion avoidance, fair operation while maintaining high utilization, use of input rate as a congestion metric, O(1) complexity. This paper presents an overview of the scheme, presents those features of the scheme that have now become common features of other switch algorithms and discusses three extensions of the scheme.