University of Texas at Austin Department of Computer Sciences
Networking Research Laboratory
Department of Computer Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin

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