Congestion management in multistage interconnection networks is a serious problem, which is not solved completely. In order to avoid the degradation of network performance when congestion appears, several congestion management mechanisms have been proposed. Most of these mechanisms are based on explicit congestion notification. For this purpose, switches detect congestion and depending on the applied strategy, packets are marked to warn the source hosts. In response, source hosts apply some corrective actions to adjust their packet injection rate. Although these proposals seem quite effective, they either exhibit some drawbacks or are partial solutions. Some of them introduce some penalties over the flows not responsible for congestion, whereas others can cope only with congestion situations that last for a short time. In this paper, we present an overview of the different strategies to detect and correct congestion in multistage interconnection networks, and propose a new mechanism referred to as Marking and Validation Congestion Management (MVCM), targeted to this kind of lossless networks, and based on a more refined packet marking strategy combined with a fair set of corrective actions, that makes the mechanism able to effectively manage congestion regardless of the congestion degree. Evaluation results show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed mechanism.

Several packet marking-based mechanisms have been proposed to manage congestion in multistage interconnection networks. One of them, the MVCM mechanism obtains very good results for different network configurations and traffic loads. However, as MVCM applies full virtual output queuing at origin, its memory requirements may jeopardize its scalability. Additionally, the applied packet marking technique introduces certain delay to detect congestion. In this paper, we propose and evaluate the Scalable Early Congestion Management mechanism which eliminates the drawbacks exhibited by MVCM. The new mechanism replaces the full virtual output queuing at origin by either a partial virtual output queuing or a shared buffer, in order to reduce its memory requirements, thus making the mechanism scalable. Also, it applies an improved packet marking technique based on marking packets at output buffers regardless of their marking at input buffers, which simplifies the marking technique, allowing also a sooner detection of the root of a congestion tree.

Congestion management is a very critical problem tackled in interconnection networks for years but not solved yet. Although several mechanisms have been recently proposed for lossless multistage interconnection networks (MINs), they either have drawbacks or are partial solutions. Some of them introduce penalty over packets not really addressed to the hot-spots, whereas others can cope only with congestion situations that last a short time. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient congestion management mechanism for lossless interconnection networks based on explicit congestion notification. The mechanism uses two different flags in ACK packets, a Marking Bit (MB) and a Validation Bit (VB), to detect congestion and warn the origin hosts. In this way, packets belonging to "coldflows" but stopped because of head-of-line (HOL) blocking can be distinguished from "hotflow" packets which are really causing congestion. In response, origin hosts can apply corrective actions only to the "hotflows", minimizing the negative impact on "coldflows"performance. Evaluation results show that the proposed congestion management strategy is able to avoid the degradation of network performance, regardless of traffic load and the location of the congestion in the network.