Performance and fairness comparison between EFCI and ERF flow control schemes for the ABR service in ATM networks

In this paper we compare by simulation based on real traffic traces between the EFCI and the ERF rate-based flow control algorithms for the ABR service in ATM Networks. The factors under considerations are: (1) distance from source to destination and (2) Rate of Resource Management (RM) cells. Although no significant fairness throughput problem has been identified in both EFCI and ERF, sources with high end-to-end propagation delay will experience higher queueing delay and loss probability. In this paper, we have also shown that although EFCI can lead to considerably lower utilization than ERF if the parameters are set arbitrarily, it can perform as good as or close to ERF if there was a complementary software which can compute the optimal parameters for EFCI based on the on-line measurement of traffic streams.