Flow Control In Connection Oriented Communication Networks with Variable Number of Virtual Connections

The paper presents a new discrete time flow control algorithm for connection oriented communication networks. The algorithm effectively exploits the Smith predictor, the discrete time proportional controller with saturation and the feed-forward compensation. The proposed control strategy helps avoid the bottleneck node buffer overflow and ensures full utilisation of the available bandwidth. The algorithm maintains its favourable properties even if the number of data sources, and virtual connections, changes during the network operation.