- The average data rate, peak data rate, maximum burst size, and effective band width are qualitative values that describe a data flow.
- A data flow can have a constant bit rate, a variable bit rate, or traffic that is bursty.
- Congestion control refers to the mechanisms and techniques to control congestion and keep the load below capacity.
- Delay and throughput measure the performance of a network.
- Open-loop congestion control prevents congestion; closed-loop congestion control removes congestion.
- TCP avoids congestion through the use of two strategies: the combination of slow start and additive increase, and multiplicative decrease.
- Frame Relay avoids congestion through the use of two strategies: backward explicit congestion notification (BECN) and forward explicit congestion notification (FECN).
- A flow can be characterized by its reliability, delay, jitter, and bandwidth.
- Scheduling, traffic shaping, resource reservation, and admission control are techniques to improve quality of service (QoS).
- FIFO queuing, priority queuing, and weighted fair queuing are scheduling techniques.
- Leaky bucket and token bucket are traffic shaping techniques.
- Integrated Services is a flow-based QoS model designed for IP.
- The Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) is a signaling protocol that helps IP create a flow and makes a resource reservation.
- Differential Services is a class-based QoS model designed for IP.
- Access rate, committed burst size, committed information rate, and excess burst size are attributes to control traffic in Frame Relay.
- Quality of service in ATM is based on service classes, user-related attributes, and network-related attributes.
Reference – Data Communications and Networking by Behrouz A. Forouzan (Author)