Design issues of a back-pressure-based congestion control mechanism

Congestion control in packet-based networks is often realized by feedback protocols -- in this paper we assess the performance under a back-pressure mechanism that has been proposed and standardized for Ethernet metropolitan networks. Relying on our earlier results for feedback fluid queues, we derive explicit expressions for the key perfomance metrics, in terms of the model parameters, as well as the parameters agreed upon in the service level agreement. Numerical experiments are performed to evaluate the main trade-offs of this model (for instance the trade-off between the signaling frequency and the throughput). These can be used to generate design guidelines. The paper is concluded by an elementary, yet powerful, Markovian model that can be used as an approximative model in situations of large traffic aggregates feeding into the system; the trade-offs and guidelines identified for the feedback fluid model turn out to carry over to this more stylized model.