Too much network traffic can cause congestion, degrading performance through increased delays and packet loss. Congestion occurs when network load exceeds capacity. Both network and transport layers handle congestion, though networks directly experience it. Congestion control mechanisms aim to prevent or reduce congestion through open-loop policies like admission control or closed-loop feedback between nodes experiencing congestion and sources of traffic. Explicit signaling allows nodes to directly notify sources of congestion.
Too much network traffic can cause congestion, degrading performance through increased delays and packet loss. Congestion occurs when network load exceeds capacity. Both network and transport layers handle congestion, though networks directly experience it. Congestion control mechanisms aim to prevent or reduce congestion through open-loop policies like admission control or closed-loop feedback between nodes experiencing congestion and sources of traffic. Explicit signaling allows nodes to directly notify sources of congestion.
Too much network traffic can cause congestion, degrading performance through increased delays and packet loss. Congestion occurs when network load exceeds capacity. Both network and transport layers handle congestion, though networks directly experience it. Congestion control mechanisms aim to prevent or reduce congestion through open-loop policies like admission control or closed-loop feedback between nodes experiencing congestion and sources of traffic. Explicit signaling allows nodes to directly notify sources of congestion.
Too much network traffic can cause congestion, degrading performance through increased delays and packet loss. Congestion occurs when network load exceeds capacity. Both network and transport layers handle congestion, though networks directly experience it. Congestion control mechanisms aim to prevent or reduce congestion through open-loop policies like admission control or closed-loop feedback between nodes experiencing congestion and sources of traffic. Explicit signaling allows nodes to directly notify sources of congestion.
Too many packets present in (a part of) the network causes packet delay and loss that degrades performance. This situation is called congestion. In other words, 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). The network and transport layers share the responsibility for handling congestion. Since congestion occurs within the network, it is the network layer that directly experiences it and must ultimately determine what to do with the excess packets. However, the most effective way to control congestion is to reduce the load that the transport layer is placing on the network. Congestion control refers to the mechanisms and techniques to control the congestion and keep the load below the capacity.
Effects of Congestion:
• As delay increases, performance decreases.
• If delay increases, retransmission occurs, making situation even worse
Congestion, in the context of networks, refers to a network state where a node or link carries so much data that it may deteriorate network service quality, resulting in queuing delay, frame or data packet loss and the blocking of new connections.
Congestion in data networking and queuing theory is the reduced quality of service that occurs when a network node is carrying more data than it can handle. Typical effects include queuing, delay, packet loss or the blocking of new connections.
Congestion in a network or internetwork occurs because routers and switches have queues – buffers that hold the packets before and after processing.
A router, for example, has an input queue and an output queue for each interface. When a packet arrives at the incoming interface, it undergoes three steps before departing.
• The packet is put at the end of the input queue while waiting to be checked. • The processing module of the router removes the packet from the input queue once it reaches the front of the queue and uses its routing table and the destination address to find the route. • The packet is put in the appropriate output queue and waits its turn to be sent.
General Principles of Congestion Control:
Congestion control refers to techniques and mechanisms that can either prevent congestion, before it happens, or remove congestion, after it has happened.
The General Principles of Congestion Control are as follows:
Open Loop Principle: solve problem by good design
• attempt to prevent congestion from happening
• after system is running, no corrections made
Closed Loop Principle: concept of feedback loop
• monitor system to detect congestion
• pass information to where action is taken • adjust system operation to correct problem
Congestion Prevention Policies:
Congestion prevention policies can be broadly divided into two broad categories.
In open-loop congestion control, policies are applied to prevent congestion before it happens. In these mechanisms, congestion control is handled by either the source or the destination. The list of policies that can prevent congestion are:
Retransmission Policy:
It is the policy in which retransmission of the packets are taken care. 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
Window Policy
The type of window at the sender side may also affect the congestion. Several packets in the Go-back-n window are resent, although some packets may be received successfully at the receiver side. This duplication may increase the congestion in the network and making it worse.
Therefore, Selective repeat window should be adopted as it sends the specific packet that may have been lost.
Acknowledgement Policy
Since acknowledgement are also the part of the load in 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 a acknowledgment only if it has to send a packet or a timer expires.
A good discarding policy adopted by the routers is that the routers may prevent congestion and at the same time partially discards the corrupted or less sensitive package and also 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.
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.
Closed Loop Congestion Control
Closed-Loop congestion control mechanisms try to reduce effects of congestion after it happens.
Back Pressure:
Backpressure is a technique in which a congested node stops receiving packet from upstream node. This may cause the upstream node or nodes to become congested and rejects receiving data from above nodes. Backpressure is a node-to-node congestion control technique that propagate in the opposite direction of data flow. The backpressure technique can be applied only to virtual circuit where each node has information of its above upstream node.
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 informs the source to slow down.
Choke Packet:
Choke packet technique is applicable to both virtual networks as well as datagram subnets. 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 have traveled are not warned about congestion.
In this method, there is no communication between congested node or nodes and the source. The source guesses that there is congestion somewhere in the network from other symptoms. For example, when source sends several packets and there is no acknowledgment for a while, one assumption is that network is congested and source should slow down.
Explicit Signaling:
In 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 different packet as in case of choke packet technique.
Explicit signaling can occur in either forward or backward direction.
Forward Signaling: In forward signaling 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 signal is sent in the opposite direction of the congestion. The source is warned about congestion and it needs to slow down.
Congestion Control in Virtual‐Circuit Subnet (TCP)
Congestion Control in Virtual‐Circuit Subnet is closed loop-based design for connection-oriented services which can be done during connection set up. The basic principle is that when setting up a virtual circuit, we have to make sure that congestion be avoided.
The following method is used for congestion control in VC.
• Admission Control
➢ Once the congestion has been signaled, no more new virtual circuits can be set up until the problem has been solved.
➢ This type of approach is often used in normal telephone networks. When the exchange is overloaded, then no new calls are established.
➢ To allow new virtual connections, route these carefully so that none of the congested router (or none of the problem area) is a part of this route i.e. to avoid the part of the network that is overloaded.
➢ Yet another approach can be: To negotiate different parameters between the host and the network, when the connection is setup. During the setup time itself, Host specifies the volume and shape of traffic, quality of service, maximum delay and other parameters, related to the traffic it would be offering to the network. Once the host specifies its requirement, the resources needed are reserved along the path, before the actual packet follows.
Normally when router A sets a connection to B, it would pass through one of the two congested routers, as this would result in a minimum-hop route. To avoid congestion, a temporary subnet is redrawn by eliminating congested routers. A virtual circuit can then be established to avoid congestion.
Congestion control in datagram subnets (UDP)
Congestion control approaches which can be used in the datagram subnets. The techniques are:
Router checks the status of each output line. If it is too occupied, sends a choke packet to the source. The host is assumed to be cooperative and will slow down. When the source gets a choke packet, it cuts rate by half and ignores further choke packets coming from the same destination for a fixed period. After that period has expired, the host listens for more choke packets. If one arrives, the host cuts rate by half again. If no choke packet arrives, the host may increase the rate.
2) Hop-by-Hop Choke Packets:
This technique is advanced over Choked packet method. At high speed over long distances, sending a packet all the way back to the source doesn’t help much, because by the time choke packet reach the source, already a lot of packets destined to the same original destination would be out from the source. Solution to this scenario can be hop-by-hop choke packets. When choke packet reaches router F, it forwards choke packet to router E as well as reduces its traffic to D. Thus, the problem that D has is “push-back” to F and D gets relief quickly. This process is repeated down the route until the ball is back to the root source A.
Admission control, choke packets, fair queuing are the techniques suitable for light congestion. But if these techniques cannot make the congestion to disappear, then the load shedding technique is to be used. The principle of load shedding states that when the routers are being inundated by the packets away. A router which is flooding with packets due to congestion can drop any packets at random. The policy for dropping a packet depends on the type of packet. So, the policy for file transfer called wine (old is better than new) and that for the multimedia is called milk (new is better than old). To implement such an intelligent discard policy, co-operation from the sender is essential. The applications should mark their packets are to be discarded the routers can first drop packets from lowest class.
Jitter control:
Jitter is defined as the variation in delay for the packets belonging to the same flow. The real time audio and video cannot tolerate jitter on the other hand the jitter does not matter if the packets are carrying an information contained in a file. For the audio and video transmission if the packets take 20 msec to 30msec to reach the destination, it does not matter, provided that the delay remains constant. When a packet arrives at a router, the router will check to see whether the packet is behind or ahead and by what time. This information is stored in the packet and updated every hop. If the packet is ahead of the schedule then the router will hold it for slightly longer time and if the packet is behind the schedule, then the router will try to send it out as quickly as possible.
QoS Concept: Quality of service (QoS) refers to a network’s ability to achieve maximum bandwidth and deal with other network performance elements like latency, error rate and uptime. Quality of service also involves controlling and managing network resources by setting priorities for specific types of data (video, audio, files) on the network. In other words, QoS in networking is the overall performance of a network, particularly seen by the users of the network. To quantitatively measure QoS, several related aspects of the network service are often considered, such as delay, bandwidth, jitter, reliability etc.
• Reliability
➢ Lack of reliability means losing a packet or acknowledgment, that means retransmission.
➢ Sensitivity of application programs to reliability is not the same. For example, it is more important that electronic mail, file transfer and internet access have reliable transmissions than telephony or audio conferencing.
• Delay
➢ Source to destination is another flow characteristic.
➢ Applications can tolerate delay in different degrees.
➢ For example, telephony, audio conferencing, video conferencing and remote log in need minimum delay, while delay in file transfer or email is less important.
➢ Defined as the variation in the packet delay. High jitter means the difference between delays is large, low jitter means the variation is small.
➢ For examples, if four packets depart at times 0, 1, 2, 3 and arrive at 20, 21, 22, 23, all have the same delay, 20 units of time. On the other hand, if the above four packets arrive at 21, 23, 21, and 28, they will have different delays.
➢ For applications such as audio and video, the first case is completely acceptable. The second case is not.
• Bandwidth
➢ Different applications need different bandwidths.
➢ In video conferencing we need to send millions of bits per second to refresh a color screen while the total number of bits in an email may not reach even a million.
