Network Congestion Occurs When There

Network congestion occurs when there is an overwhelming level of packet-based traffic on a network and the Quality of Service (QoS) degrades to the point of users not being able to complete tasks (Wen, Wang, Yang, 2007). The use of Carrier Sense Multiple Access / Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) and Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Detection (CSMA/CD) have been designed as protocols to minimize the potential for network congestion to occur.

The IBM Token Ring network protocol relies on the CSMA/CA-based approach to mitigate packet collisions and therefore alleviate network congestion. Conversely TCP/IP, which is based on the Ethernet II standard (Chang, Lin, Jin, 2009) relies on the CSMA/CD standard for collision detection of packets on a network. Of these two approaches, the CSMA/CD approach to controlling network congestion is far more prevalent due to the ubiquity of the Internet today.

The use of packet analyzers and performance analysis systems and advanced instrumentation give network administrators the opportunity to analyze network traffic over time and understand its causes (Balamash, Krunz, Nain, 2007). Attempts to alleviate or at least reduce network congestion including using Run length Encoding (RLL) for packet size reduction, the use of abbreviated headers for optimizing their path through networks, and the development of protocols that seek to optimize path selection through a network (Wen, Wang, Yang, 2007).

The challenge of continually enhancing and increasing network performance through better optimization of paths throughout a network is being made more challenging with the en masse adoption of WiFi as well (Wen, Wang, Yang, 2007). References Abdullah.