Study on Routing and Flow Control in Computer Networks

Book excerpt: The objectives of this research were the investigation of certain issues on routing, flow control, and the relationship between the two. More specifically, the following research tasks were carried out: (1) It was shown that while deterministic routing may seem to perform better under stable traffic conditions, the adaptive strategy out-performs the deterministic one for networks spanning several time zones; (2) Approximation models were determined for determining response time on a virtual circuit under the real network condition that arriving packets encountering a full window wait in buffers instead of being discarded, as in the case of earlier models; (3) A detailed simulation model was developed to verify the approximate analytic model and to perform certain experiments; (4) A strategy for determining optimal window size was developed based on the minimum-cut of a multi-commodity problem. Originator supplied keywords: Adaptive routing; Deterministic routing; Flow control; Window-type flow control; Coxian distribution; Virtual circuits; Window size; Routing table; Update epoch; Multi-commodity problem; Minimum-cut.