Congestion avoidance for supporting a best-effort service in an ATM LAN

In this paper, after having presented some issues related to atm within a lan, we introduce the besteffort service. We then discuss different concepts of flow control to support such a service. After having proposed a definition of fairness, we focus on one flow control mechanism, namely a hop- by hop backpressure scheme. We describe the mechanism and show that it can protect the network against excessive traffic while insuring fairness among the different sources. We also explain how such a mechanism could be implemented at the uni by using current technology and by relying on the standards currently being drafted in the itu and the atm Forum. © 1995 Springer-Verlag.