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Traffic Management &

Congestion in Data Networks

CSC4304: Network Design

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Congestion at Networks Layer

Network Design Considerations

Network Layer
• General principles
• Design issues
• Prevention policies
• Routing
• Handling virtual circuit
• Congestion subnets
• Internetworking • General techniques
• Internet Protocols • Jitter control

• Multimedia or QoS

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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. So, before talking about congestion
control and quality of service, we discuss the data traffic itself.
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.

Effects of Congestion
• Packets arriving are stored at input buffers
• Routing decision made
• Packet moves to output buffer
• Packets queued for output transmitted as fast as
possible
— Statistical time division multiplexing
• If packets arrive to fast to be routed, or to be output,
buffers will fill
• Can discard packets
• Can use flow control
— Can propagate congestion through network

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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).

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Congestion Control Introduction:

• When too many packets are present in (a part of) the subnet,
performance degrades. This situation is called congestion.
• As traffic increases too far, the routers are no longer able to cope
and they begin losing packets.
• At very high traffic, performance collapses completely and almost no
packets are delivered.
• Reasons of Congestion:
— Slow Processors.
— High stream of packets sent from one of the sender.
— Insufficient memory.
— High memory of Routers also add to congestion as becomes un manageable
and un accessible. (Nagle, 1987).
— Low bandwidth lines.
• Then what is congestion control? Congestion control has to do
with making sure the subnet is able to carry the offered traffic.
• Congestion control and flow control are often confused but both
helps reduce congestion.

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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).

Congestion: principles
Control theory viewpoint
open loop closed loop
• How? Good design • Monitor: where and when congestion?
— Make sure the problem — % packets discarded
does not occur — average queue length
• Tools — number of packets that time out
— Decide when to accept — average packet delay
traffic • Pass collected info to places where
— Decide when to discard actions can be taken = source of traffic
packets and which ones — explicit <> implicit feedback
— Make scheduling — explicit: (extra) packet, flags (in other
decisions in the subnet
packets), probe packets

• Adjust system operation

— Increase resources: bandwidth
— Decrease load: deny, degrade
service
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Network Layer
• General principles
• Design issues
• Prevention policies
• Routing • Handling virtual circuit
• Congestion subnets
• Internetworking • General techniques
• Jitter control
• Internet Protocols
• Multimedia or QoS

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Congestion: prevention
• Minimize congestion
Layer Policies
Transport  Retransmission policy
 Out-of-order caching policy
 Acknowledgement policy
 Flow control policy
 Timeout determination

Network  Virtual circuits <> datagrams in subnet

 Packet queueing and service policy
 Packet discard policy
 Routing algorithm
 Packet lifetime management

Data link  See transport layer

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Network Layer
• General principles
• Design issues
• Prevention policies
• Routing • Handling virtual circuit
• Congestion subnets
• Internetworking • General techniques
• Jitter control
• Internet Protocols
• Multimedia or QoS

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Virtual circuit subnets

• Dynamic approach: act when needed
• Admission control
—No new virtual circuits when congestion is signalled
—e.g. telephone network
• Route new virtual circuits around problem areas

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Network Layer
• General principles
• Design issues
• Prevention policies
• Routing • Handling virtual circuit
• Congestion subnets
• Internetworking • General techniques
• Jitter control
• Internet Protocols
• Multimedia or QoS

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CONGESTION CONTROL TECHNIQUES

Congestion control refers to the techniques used to control or prevent
congestion. Congestion control techniques can be broadly classified
into two categories:

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Opened Loop Congestion Control

Open loop congestion control policies are applied to prevent
congestion before it happens. The congestion control is handled
either by the source or the destination.
Policies adopted by open loop congestion control –
1. Retransmission Policy :
 It is the policy in which retransmission of the packets are taken care of. If the
sender feels that a sent packet is lost or corrupted, the packet needs to be
retransmitted. This transmission may increase the congestion in the network.
 To prevent congestion, retransmission timers must be designed to prevent
congestion and also able to optimize efficiency.
2. Window Policy :
 The type of window at the sender’s side may also affect the congestion. Several
packets in the Go-back-n window are re-sent, although some packets may be
received successfully at the receiver side.
 This duplication may increase the congestion in the network and make it worse.

Opened Loop Congestion Control

3. Discarding Policy :
 A good discarding policy adopted by the routers is that the routers may
prevent congestion and at the same time partially discard the corrupted or
less sensitive packages and also be able to maintain the quality of a
message.
 In case of audio file transmission, routers can discard less sensitive
packets to prevent congestion and also maintain the quality of the audio
file.
4. Acknowledgment Policy
 Since acknowledgements are also the part of the load in the network, the
acknowledgment policy imposed by the receiver may also affect
congestion. Several approaches can be used to prevent congestion
related to acknowledgment.
 The receiver should send acknowledgement for N packets rather than
sending acknowledgement for a single packet. The receiver should send
an acknowledgment only if it has to send a packet or a timer expires.

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Opened Loop Congestion Control

1.Admission Policy

 In admission policy a mechanism should be used to prevent

congestion.
 Switches in a flow should first check the resource requirement of
a network flow before transmitting it further.
 If there is a chance of a congestion or there is a congestion in
the network, router should deny establishing a virtual network
connection to prevent further congestion.

All the above policies are adopted to prevent

congestion before it happens in the network.

Closed Loop Congestion Control

Closed loop congestion control technique is used to
treat or alleviate congestion after it happens. Several
techniques are used by different protocols; some of
them are:
1. Backpressure
 Technique in which a congested node stops receiving
packets from upstream node.
 This may cause the upstream node or nodes to
become congested and reject receiving data from
above nodes.
 is a node-to-node congestion control technique that
propagate in the opposite direction of data flow.
 can be applied only to virtual circuit where each node
has information of its above upstream node.

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Closed Loop Congestion Control

In above diagram the 3rd node is congested and stops receiving

packets as a result 2nd node may be get congested due to slowing
down of the output data flow. Similarly 1st node may get congested and
inform the source to slow down.

Closed Loop Congestion Control

2. Choke Packet Technique
 A choke packet is a packet sent by a node to the source to
inform it of congestion.
 Each router monitors its resources and the utilization at
each of its output lines.
 Whenever the resource utilization exceeds the threshold
value which is set by the administrator, the router directly
sends a choke packet to the source giving it a feedback to
reduce the traffic.
 The intermediate nodes through which the packets has
traveled are not warned about congestion.

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Closed Loop Congestion Control

4. Explicit Signaling
 if a node experiences congestion it can explicitly sends a
packet to the source or destination to inform about
congestion.
 The difference between choke packet and explicit signaling is
that the signal is included in the packets that carry data rather
than creating a different packet as in case of choke packet
technique.
 Occur in either forward or backward direction.
 Forward Signaling : In forward signaling, a signal is sent in
the direction of the congestion. The destination is warned
about congestion. The receiver in this case adopt policies to
prevent further congestion.
 Backward Signaling : In backward signaling, a signal is
sent in the opposite direction of the congestion. The source
is warned about congestion and it needs to slow down.

Network Layer
• General principles
• Design issues • Prevention policies
• Routing • Handling virtual circuit
• Congestion subnets
• General techniques
• Internetworking
• Jitter control
• Internet Protocols
• Multimedia or QoS

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Congestion: jitter control

• Jitter = variation in packet delay
• Compute feasible mean value for delay
—compute expected transit time for each hop
—router checks to see if packet is
• behind
• ahead schedule
—behind: forward packet asap
—ahead: hold back packet to get it on schedule again
• Buffering? Depends on characteristics:
—Video on demand: ok
—Videoconferencing: nok
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Traffic Management and

Congestion Control Techniques
• Resource management using virtual paths
• Connection admission control
• Usage parameter control
• Selective cell discard
• Traffic shaping

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Resource Management Using

Virtual Paths
• Separate traffic flow according to service
characteristics
• User to user application
• User to network application
• Network to network application

• Concern with:
—Cell loss ratio
—Cell transfer delay
—Cell delay variation

Connection Admission Control

• First line of defense
• User specifies traffic characteristics for new
connection (VCC or VPC) by selecting a QoS
• Network accepts connection only if it can meet
the demand
• Traffic contract
—Peak cell rate
—Cell delay variation
—Sustainable cell rate
—Burst tolerance

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Usage Parameter Control

• Monitor connection to ensure traffic cinforms to
contract
• Protection of network resources from overload
by one connection
• Done on VCC and VPC
• Peak cell rate and cell delay variation
• Sustainable cell rate and burst tolerance
• Discard cells that do not conform to traffic
contract
• Called traffic policing

Quality of Service
 Quality of service (QoS) is the use of mechanisms or
technologies that work on a network to control traffic and
ensure the performance of critical applications with limited
network capacity.
 It enables organizations to adjust their overall network traffic by
prioritizing specific high-performance applications

• Requirements
• Minimum throughput and maximum latency
• Techniques for Achieving Good Quality of Service
• Integrated Services
• Differentiated Services
• Label Switching and MPLS

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Quality of Service
The key goal is;
• to enable networks and organizations to prioritize traffic, which
includes offering dedicated bandwidth, controlled jitter, and
lower latency.
• The technologies used to ensure this are vital to enhancing the
performance of business applications, wide-area networks
(WANs), and service provider networks.

How Does QoS Work?

 QoS networking technology works
 marking packets to identify service types,
 then configuring routers to create separate virtual queues
for each application, based on their priority.

How Does QoS Work?

 As a result, bandwidth is reserved for critical

applications or websites that have been assigned priority
access.
 QoS technologies provide capacity and handling
allocation to specific flows in network traffic.
 This enables the network administrator to assign the
order in which packets are handled and provide the
appropriate amount of bandwidth to each application or
traffic flow.

Understanding how QoS network software works is reliant on

defining the various types of traffic that it measures. These are:

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Types of Network Traffic

1.Bandwidth: The speed of a link. QoS can tell a router how to use
bandwidth.
• For example, assigning a certain amount of bandwidth to different
queues for different traffic types.
2.Delay: The time it takes for a packet to go from its source to its end
destination.
• This can often be affected by queuing delay, which occurs during
times of congestion and a packet waits in a queue before being
transmitted.
• QoS enables organizations to avoid this by creating a priority
queue for certain types of traffic.
3.Loss: The amount of data lost as a result of packet loss, which typically
occurs due to network congestion. QoS enables organizations to decide
which packets to drop in this event.
4.Jitter: The irregular speed of packets on a network as a result of
congestion, which can result in packets arriving late and out of
sequence. This can cause distortion or gaps in audio and video being
delivered.

Requirements
How stringent the quality-of-service requirements
are.
5-30

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Categories of QoS and Examples

1.Constant bit rate

• Telephony
2.Real-time variable bit rate
• Compressed videoconferencing
3.Non-real-time variable bit rate
• Watching a movie on demand
4.Available bit rate
• File transfer

Packet Scheduling
Kinds of resources that can potentially be
reserved for different flows:

1. Bandwidth.
2. Buffer space.
3. CPU cycles.

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