A predictive flow control scheme for efficient network utilization and QoS

Dongyu Qiu, Ness B. Shroff

Abstract: In this paper, we develop a new predictive flow control scheme and analyze its performance. This scheme controls the nonreal-time (controllable) traffic based on predicting the real-time (uncontrollable) traffic. The goal of the work is to operate the network in a low congestion, high throughput regime. We provide a rigorous analysis of the performance of our flow control method and show that the algorithm has attractive and useful properties. From our analysis we obtain an explicit condition that gives us design guidelines on how to choose a predictor. We learn that it is especially important to take the queueing effect into account in developing the predictor. We also provide numerical results comparing different predictors that use varying degrees of information from the network.