The classical max-min policy has been suggested by the ATM Forum to support the available bit rate (ABR) service class. However, there are several drawbacks in adopting the max-min rate allocation policy. In particular, the max-min policy is not able to support the minimum cell rate (MCR) requirement and the peak cell rate (PCR) constraint for each ABR connection. Furthermore, the max-min policy does not offer flexible options for network providers wishing to establish a usage-based pricing criterion. In this paper, we present a generic weight-based rate allocation policy, which generalizes the classical max-min policy by supporting the MCR/PCR for each connection. Our rate allocation policy offers a flexible usage-based pricing strategy to network providers. A centralized algorithm is presented to compute network-wide bandwidth allocation to achieve this policy. Furthermore, a simple switch algorithm using ABR flow control protocol is developed with the aim of achieving our rate allocation policy in a distributed networking environment. The effectiveness of our distributed algorithm in a local area environment is substantiated by simulation results based on the benchmark network configurations suggested by the ATM Forum.

This paper proposes a mutual exclusion method that is unified for the parallel and distributed systems. The method partially serializes requests into partial queues of requests, which are next totally serialized into a main queue. A request in the main queue is authorized to enter the critical section (CS) when the request receives the privilege token from the previous request in the queue. In the distributed system of N sites that each is a parallel system, mutual exclusion is performed by cooperation of two algorithms based on the same method. The algorithm for the distributed system works on a logical network (that is a directed tree) of S ( N) sites. The algorithm for each site produces a local-main queue of requests. The chunk of requests in the local queue is concatenated at a time to the partial queue of the distributed system. The the cost of mutual exclusion -- the number of intersite messages required per CS entry -- is reduced to O(1) (between 0 and 3).