Emerging multimedia communication networks differ from transitional data networks in that they use very high speed transmission facilities and they carry various types of traffic with different performance requirements. So, effective communication protocols that encounter for several traffic and performance characteristics need to be developed in order to meet the required QOS (quality of service) for the various types of traffic carried. Moreover, the interactions among protocols of different communication layers have to be examined in order to ensure an efficient and high performing operation. The authors are concerned with the bandwidth allocation protocol problem. They address some recently developed approaches to the problem, and examine the two lower layers of a communication subnetwork. They consider the call and packet/cell layers where they assume that two types of traffic are carried. They propose a threshold based approach to the call admission problem in the call level and examine the need for flow control in the packet/cell level. They examine various performance measures and show that the correct choice of performance measures and the sizing of the various network parameters play a significant role in a network operation.>

We present a new adaptive flow control algorithm together with learning routing algorithms.The key performance measure in both algorithms is packet delay. Window adjustment and route selection are based on delay measurements. Simulation results have shown the superiority of the new scheme over existing algorithms.