Congestion-free communication in high-speed packet networks

Abstract

The process of packet clustering in a network with well-regulated input traffic is studied and a strategy for congestion-free communication in packet networks is proposed. The strategy provides guaranteed services per connection with no packet loss and an end-to-end delay which is a constant plus a small bounded jitter term. It is composed of an admission policy imposed per connection at the source node, and a particular queuing scheme practiced at the switching nodes, which is called stop-and-go queuing. The admission policy requires the packet stream of each connection to possess a certain smoothness property upon arrival at the network. This is equivalent to a peak bandwidth allocation per connection. The queuing scheme eliminates the process of packet clustering and thereby preserves the smoothness property as packets travel inside the network. Implementation is simple.