CHAPTER 23

Congestion Control and

Quality of Service
Review Questions
1. In congestion control, the load on a network is prevented from exceeding
the capacity. Quality of service refers to the characteristics that a flow of
data seeks to attain. If there is good congestion control, then the QoS is also
good and vice versa.
2. A traffic descriptor is a qualitative value that describes a data flow.
3. The average data rate is always less than or equal to the peak data rate.
4. The data rate of data classified as bursty changes suddenly in a very short
period of time.
5. Open-loop congestion control policies try to prevent congestion. Closedloop congestion control policies try to alleviate the effects of congestion.
6. The following policies can help to prevent congestion: a good retransmission policy, use of the selective-repeat window, a good acknowledgment
policy, a good discard policy, and a good admissions policy.
7. Congestion can be alleviated by back pressure, a choke point, and explicit
signaling.
8. The TCP sender window size is determined by the receiver and by the congestion on the network.
9. Frame Relay uses the BECN bit and the FECN bit to control congestion.
10. A flow of data can be described by its reliability, delay, jitter, and bandwidth.
11. Scheduling, traffic shaping, admission control, and resource reservation can
improve QoS.
12. Traffic shaping is a mechanism to control the amount and rate of traffic sent
to the network. The leaky bucket method and the token bucket method can
shape traffic.

CHAPTER 23 CONGESTION CONTROL AND QUALITY OF SERVICE

13. Differentiated Services was developed to handle the shortcomings of IntServ. The
main processing was moved from the core of the network to the edge of the network. Also, the per-flow service was changed to per-class service.
14. When IntServ is used at the IP level, a signaling system is needed to set up the
needed virtual circuit. The Resource Reservation Protocol is this signaling system.
15. For Frame Relay, access rate, committed burst size, committed information rate,
and excess burst size are needed for traffic control.
16. User-related attributes define how fast the user wants to send data. Networkrelated attributes define network characteristics.

Multiple-Choice Questions
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.

b
b
d
c
c
d
d
a
b
d
a
b
a
c
d
c
a
d
b
c
a
d
c
a
c
a
a
d
a

SECTION

46. d
47. c

Exercises
48. BECN bit set. Congestion in the backward direction, but no congestion in the forward direction
49. FECN bit and BECN bit set
50. 20 gallons
51. second 1: frame1 and 2
second 2: frame 3 and 4
second 3: frame 5 and 6
second 4: frame 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
second 5: frame 12
52.
a. Access rate: 1.544 Mbps
b. No
c. Yes
d. Yes. But frames may be discarded if there is congestion.
e. Some of the frames would be discarded.
f. 1 Mbps
g. 1.2 Mbps
53. There is no risk of discarding because the average bit rate is 0.56 Mbps, which is
below the CIR.
54. CTD = 10 microseconds
55. CLR = 5 /10000, CER = 2 / 10000

CHAPTER 23 CONGESTION CONTROL AND QUALITY OF SERVICE