Congestion Control: Open Loop and Closed Loop

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) as shown in Figure 4.27.

1. Open-Loop Congestion Control

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.

a.   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.

b.   Window Policy

The type of window at the sender may also affect congestion. The Selective Repeat window is better than the Go-Back-N window for congestion control. In the Go-Back-N window, when the timer for a packet times out, several packets may be resent, although some may have arrived safe and sound at the receiver. This duplication may make the congestion worse. The Selective Repeat window, on the other hand, tries to send the specific packets that have been lost or corrupted.

c.   Acknowledgment Policy

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 fewer loads on the network.

d.   Discarding Policy

A good discarding policy by the routers may prevent congestion and at the same time may not harm the integrity of the transmission. For example, in audio transmission, if the policy is to discard less sensitive packets when congestion is likely to happen, the quality of sound is still preserved and congestion is prevented or alleviated.

e.   Admission Policy

An admission policy, which is a quality-of-service mechanism, can also prevent congestion in virtual-circuit networks. Switches in a flow, first check the resource requirement of a flow before admitting it to the network. A router can deny establishing a virtual circuit connection if there is congestion in the network or if there is a possibility of future congestion.

2. Closed-Loop Congestion Control

Closed-loop congestion control mechanisms try to alleviate congestion after it happens. Several mechanisms have been used by different protocols.

a. Backpressure

The technique of backpressure refers to a congestion control mechanism in which a congested node stops receiving data from the immediate upstream node or nodes. This may cause the upstream node or nodes to become congested, and they, in turn, reject data from their upstream nodes or nodes. And so on. Backpressure is a node-to-node congestion control that starts with a node and propagates, in the opposite direction of data flow, to the source. The backpressure technique can be applied only to virtual circuit networks, in which each node knows the upstream node from which a flow of data is corning. Figure 4.28 shows the idea of backpressure.

Node III in the figure has more input data than it can handle. It drops some packets in its input buffer and informs node II to slow down. Node II, in turn, may be congested because it is slowing down the output flow of data. If node II is congested, it informs node I to slow down, which in turn may create congestion. If so, node I inform the source of data to slow down. This, in time, alleviates the congestion. Note that the pressure on node III is moved backward to the source to remove the congestion.

b.   Choke Packet

A choke packet is a packet sent by a node to the source to inform it of congestion. Note the difference between the backpressure and choke packet methods. In backpressure, the warning is from one node to its upstream node, although the warning may eventually reach the source station. In the choke packet method, the warning is from the router, which has encountered congestion, to the source station directly. The intermediate nodes through which the packet has traveled are not warned. We have seen an example of this type of control in ICMP. When a router in the Internet is overwhelmed with IP datagrams, it may discard some of them; but it informs the source host, using a source quench ICMP message. The warning message goes directly to the source station; the intermediate routers, and does not take any action. Figure 4.29 shows the idea of a choke packet.

c. Implicit Signaling

In implicit signaling, there is no communication between the congested node or nodes and the source. The source guesses that there is congestion somewhere in the network from other symptoms. For example, when a source sends several packets and there is no acknowledgment for a while, one assumption is that the network is congested. The delay in receiving an acknowledgment is interpreted as congestion in the network; the source should slow down.

d.   Explicit Signaling

The node that experiences congestion can explicitly send a signal to the source or destination. The explicit signaling method, however, is different from the choke packet method. In the choke packet method, a separate packet is used for this purpose; in the explicit signaling method, the signal is included in the packets that carry data. Explicit signaling, as we will see in Frame Relay congestion control, can occur in either the forward or the backward direction.

i. Backward Signaling

A bit can be set in a packet moving in the direction opposite to the congestion. This bit can warn the source that there is congestion and that it needs to slow down to avoid the discarding of packets.

ii. Forward Signaling

A bit can be set in a packet moving in the direction of the congestion. This bit can warn the destination that there is congestion. The receiver in this case can use policies, such as slowing down the acknowledgments, to alleviate the congestion.