Hop-by-hop flow control in an ATM network

摘要

A communication system comprises a plurality of hops interconnected by links comprising a plurality of connections. The traffic between the hops is shared between a reserved bandwidth service and a non reserved bandwidth service. The control of said non reserved bandwidth service comprises a hop by hop backpressure mechanism. When the traffic entering a hop exceeds a low/high threshold, the backpressure mechanism generates start/stop backpressure primitives in order to resume/throttle the entering traffic. In case of congestion the mechanism is either able to selectively stop the connection contributing to the congestion without affecting the rest of the link traffic, or to globally stop the whole link traffic.