On the Influence of the Packet Marking and Injection Control Schemes in Congestion Management for MINs

Several Congestion Management Mechanisms (CMMs) have been proposed for Multistage Interconnection Networks (MINs) in order to avoid the degradation of network performance when congestion appears. Most of them are based on Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN). For this purpose, switches detect congestion and, depending on the applied mechanism, some flags are marked to warn the source hosts. In response, source hosts apply corrective actions to adjust their packet injection rate. These mechanisms have been evaluated by analyzing whether they are able to manage a congestion situation but there is not a comparison study among them. Moreover, marking effects are not separately analyzed from corrective actions. In this paper, we analyze the current proposals for CMMs, showing the impact of the applied packet marking techniques as well as the corrective actions they apply.