摘要:
A rate based, end to end flow control system is disclosed for a communications network. The disclosed rate based flow control system includes each source end station selecting its transmission rate from a set of permitted discrete transmission rates. The set of permitted discrete transmission rates is based on a logarithmic encoding. The disclosed rate based traffic control system further requires each source end station to send one end to end control cell every time period T. The time period T is also known by switches in the communications network, and is used to periodically calculate an available allocation (or "fair share") of bandwidth at a switch for a given virtual circuit.