Director: Simon S. Lam (more publications)
Flow and Congestion Control
As one of the first few research groups that worked on flow and congestion control of packet networks in the 1970s, we developed queueing network models and used extensive simulations in our investigation. We discovered basic principles that are used in modern Internet congestion control algorithms. In our 1980 Proc. ICCC and 1981 Trans. on Computers papers, we demonstrated that the window size of each end-to-end flow must adapt to network load to avoid network congestion collapse. We also proposed the input buffer limits strategy for congestion control – specifically, a router starts to drop some packets when its buffer utilization exceeds a threshold; this was one of the earliest examples of active queue management.
Selected Publications
Simon S. Lam and Martin Reiser, Congestion Control of Store-and-Forward Networks by Input Buffer Limits, Conference Rec. National Telecommunications Conference, Los Angeles, CA, December 1977.
Simon S. Lam and Martin Reiser, Congestion Control of Store-and-Forward Networks by Input Buffer Limits--An Analysis, IEEE Trans. on Commun., Vol. COM-27, January 1979.
Simon S. Lam and Y. Luke Lien, An Experimental Study of the Congestion Control of Packet Communications Networks, Proceedings International Conference on Computer Communications, Atlanta, GA, October 1980.
Simon S. Lam and Y. Luke Lien, Congestion Control of Packet Communication Networks by Input Buffer Limits--A Simulation Study, IEEE Trans. on Computers, Vol. C-30, No. 10, October 1981.
Simon S. Lam and Y. Luke Lien, Modeling and Analysis of Flow Controlled Packet Switching Networks, Proceedings Seventh Data Communications Symposium, Mexico City, October 1981, IEEE Computer Society Press.
Simon S. Lam and Y. Luke Lien, Optimal Routing in Networks with Flow-Controlled Virtual Channels, Computer Network Performance Symposium, University of Maryland, April 1982, published in Performance Evaluation Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1982.