Chapter 24

Congestion Control and

Quality of Service

24.1
 Congestion Control and
Quality of Service

These are issues related not to one layer, but

to three:
• The data link layer,
• The network layer, and
• The transport layer.

24.2
 24-1 DATA TRAFFIC

The main focus of congestion control and

quality of service is data traffic.
• In congestion control, we try to avoid
traffic congestion.
• In quality of service, we try to create an
appropriate environment for the traffic.

24.3
 24-2 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.
Reasons of Congestion: Congestion happens in any
system that involves waiting.

24.4
Congestion Control Introduction:
 Congestion control and flow control are often
confused but both helps reduce congestion.
 Congestion control is a global issue – involves
every router and host within the subnet
 Flow control – scope is point-to-point; involves
just sender and receiver.
General Principles of Congestion Control
 Three Step approach to apply congestion control:
1. Monitor the system .
 detect when and where congestion occurs.

2. Pass information to where action can be taken.

3. Adjust system operation to correct the problem.

 How to monitor the subnet for congestion.

1) percentage of all packets discarded for lack of buffer
space,
2) average queue lengths,
3) number of packets that time out and are retransmitted,
4) average packet delay
5) standard deviation of packet delay (jitter Control).
 The presence of congestion means that the load
is (temporarily) greater than the resources can
handle.
 Solution?
 increase the resources or

 decrease the load.

 That is not always possible. So we have to apply

some congestion prevention policy.
 24-3 CONGESTION CONTROL

Congestion control refers to techniques and mechanisms

that can either
 prevent congestion, before it happens, or
 remove congestion, after it has happened.

In general, we can divide congestion control

mechanisms into two broad categories:
• open-loop congestion control (prevention) and
• closed-loop congestion control (removal).

24.8
 Figure 24.5 Congestion control categories

24.9
 They further divide the open loop algorithms into ones
that act at the source versus ones that act at the
destination.
The closed-loop algorithms are also divided into two
subcategories:
• Explicit feedback
• Implicit feedback.

 In explicit feedback algorithms, packets are sent back

from the point of congestion to warn the source.
 In implicit algorithms, the source deduces the existence
of congestion by making local observations, such as
the time needed for acknowledgements to come back.

24.10
 Retransmission Policy
Retransmission is sometimes unavoidable. If the sender feels
that a sent packet is lost or corrupted, the packet needs to be
retransmitted.
Retransmission in general may increase congestion in the
network. However, a good retransmission policy can prevent
congestion.
The retransmission policy and the retransmission timers must
be designed to optimize efficiency and at the same time
prevent congestion. For example, the retransmission policy
used by TCP (explained later) is designed to prevent or
alleviate congestion.

24.11
 The acknowledgment policy imposed by the
receiver may also affect congestion.
• If the receiver does not acknowledge 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 acknowledgment
only if it has a packet to be sent or a special
timer expires.
• A receiver may decide to acknowledge only
N packets at a time. We need to know that the
acknowledgments are also part of the load in
a network. Sending fewer acknowledgments
means imposing less load on the network.
24.12
Disregarding Policy/ Load Shedding
 When buffers become full, routers simply discard
packets.
 Which packet is chosen to be the victim depends
on the application and on the error strategy used in
the data link layer.
 For a file transfer, for, e.g. cannot discard older
packets since this will cause a gap in the received
data.
 For real-time voice or video it is probably better to
throw away old data and keep new packets.
 Get the application to mark packets with discard
priority.
13
Warning Bit or Backpressure:
 DECNET(Digital Equipment Corporation to connect
mini computers) architecture signaled the warning
state by setting a special bit in the packet's header.
 The source then cut back on traffic.
 The source monitored the fraction of
acknowledgements with the bit set and adjusted its
transmission rate accordingly.
 As long as the warning bits continued to flow in, the
source continued to decrease its transmission rate.
When they slowed to a trickle, it increased its
transmission rate.
 Disadvantage: Note that since every router along the
path could set the warning bit, traffic increased only
when no router was in trouble.
 Figure 24.6 Backpressure method for alleviating congestion

24.15
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 source to restrict traffic flow.
 The source, on receiving the choke packet
must reduce its transmission rate by a
certain percentage.
 An example of a choke packet is the ICMP
Source Quench Packet.
16
 Figure 24.7 Choke packet

24.17
 Hop-by-Hop Choke Packets
 This technique is an advancement over the Choked packet
method. At high speed over long distances, sending a packet
back to the source doesn’t help much, because by the time the
choke packet reaches the source, already a lot of packets
destined for the same original the destination would be out
from the source.
 So, to help this, Hop-by-Hop Choke packets are used. Over
long distances or at high speeds choke packets are not very
effective. A more efficient the method is to send choke packets
hop-by-hop.
 This requires each hop to reduce its transmission even before
the choke packet arrives at the source.

18
Hop-by-Hop Choke Packets

19
 24-6 TECHNIQUES TO IMPROVE QoS

In this section, we discuss some techniques that can

be used to improve the quality of service. We briefly
discuss four common methods: scheduling, traffic
shaping, admission control, and resource reservation.

Topics discussed in this section:

Scheduling (RED)
Traffic Shaping
Resource Reservation
Admission Control
24.20
 Scheduling

Scheduling

Priority Weighted
FIFO RED
Queue Fair Queue

24.21
Random Early Discard (RED)
 This is a proactive approach in which the
router discards one or more packets before
the buffer becomes completely full.
 Each time a packet arrives, the RED
algorithm computes the average queue
length, avg.
 If avg is lower than some lower threshold,
congestion is assumed to be minimal or
non-existent and the packet is queued.

22
RED, cont.
 If avg is greater than some upper threshold,
congestion is assumed to be serious and the
packet is discarded.
 If avg is between the two thresholds, this
might indicate the onset of congestion. The
probability of congestion is then calculated.

23
24.24
 Traffic Shaping
 Another method of congestion control is to
“shape” the traffic before it enters the
network.
 Traffic shaping controls the rate at which
packets are sent (not just how many). Used
in ATM and Integrated Services networks.
 At connection set-up time, the sender and
carrier negotiate a traffic pattern (shape).
 Two traffic shaping algorithms are:
 Leaky Bucket
 Token Bucket
25
 Traffic Shaping

Traffic
Shaping

Leaky Token
Bucket Bucket

24.26
The Leaky Bucket Algorithm

 The Leaky Bucket Algorithm used to control

rate in a network. It is implemented as a
single-server queue with constant service time.
If the bucket (buffer) overflows then packets
are discarded.

27
 The Leaky Bucket Algorithm

(a) A leaky bucket with water. (b) a leaky bucket with packets.

28
Leaky Bucket Algorithm, cont.
 The leaky bucket enforces a constant output rate
(average rate) regardless of the burstiness of the input.
Does nothing when input is idle.
 The host injects one packet per clock tick onto the
network. This results in a uniform flow of packets,
smoothing out bursts and reducing congestion.
 When packets are the same size (as in ATM cells), the
one packet per tick is okay. For variable length packets
though, it is better to allow a fixed number of bytes per
tick. E.g. 1024 bytes per tick will allow one 1024-byte
packet or two 512-byte packets or four 256-byte packets
on 1 tick.

29
 Figure 24.20 Leaky bucket implementation

24.30
 Note

A leaky bucket algorithm shapes bursty

traffic into fixed-rate traffic by averaging
the data rate. It may drop the packets if
the bucket is full.

24.31
Token Bucket Algorithm
 In contrast to the LB, the Token Bucket
Algorithm, allows the output rate to vary,
depending on the size of the burst.
 In the TB algorithm, the bucket holds tokens. To
transmit a packet, the host must capture and
destroy one token.
 Tokens are generated by a clock at the rate of one
token every t sec.
 Idle hosts can capture and save up tokens (up to
the max. size of the bucket) in order to send larger
bursts later.
32
The Token Bucket Algorithm

5-34

(a) Before. (b) After. 33

Leaky Bucket vs Token Bucket
 LB discards packets; TB does not. TB
discards tokens.
 With TB, a packet can only be transmitted if
there are enough tokens to cover its length in
bytes.
 LB sends packets at an average rate. TB
allows for large bursts to be sent faster by
speeding up the output.
 TB allows saving up tokens (permissions) to
send large bursts. LB does not allow saving.

34
 Figure 24.21 Token bucket

24.35