Saito, H., Ishizuka, M., and Kawashima, K., "Available Bit Rate Service: open issues," ITC Seminar 96 (1996) (invited paper).
Open issues in Available Bit Rate (ABR) services are discussed. The first issue is TCP over ABR. TCP, which is a typical upper layer of ABR, has its own control, which may conflict with that of ABR. Our study indicates that TCP over ABR works well particularly for a large granularity of the TCP timer. The second issue is point-to-multipoint (p-mp) ABR. To keep the cell loss ratio low, the source cell rate must be lower than the minimum available bandwidth in the whole p-mp ABR connection. When the number of leaves in the p-mp connection is large, the source cell rate is very small. This paper proposes a weighted bandwidth allocation where the weight is an increasing function of the number of leaves of the p-mp connection. ABR parameter selection and UPC are also discussed.