Considerable protocol development efforts in recent ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) Forum activities have been focused on the traffic management of available bit rate (ABR) service. It has been shown that ABR service enables persistent, greedy data sources to efficiently utilize ATM network resources with the help of a rate-based flow control mechanism. ATM Forum Traffic Management Specification Version 4.0 document gives a complete description of the end system behavior of the flow control mechanism, but it leaves the details of the switch behavior to be vendor-implementation dependent. For the sake of compatibility and interoperation among flow control mechanisms implemented by vendors, two rate-based mechanisms EPRCA (Enhanced Proportional Rate Control Algorithm) and ERICA (Explicit Rate Indication for Congestion Avoidance) have been recommended in the specification. In this paper, the mechanisms are studied and their performance is analyzed and compared with a material network. Simulation shows that ERICA is significantly better than EPRCA in the performance of steady state and instantaneous state of source end system ACR (Allowed Cell Rate) and buffer queue of bottleneck switch.
