A novel probabilistic fuzzy control system is proposed to treat the congestion avoidance problem in transmission control protocol （TCP） networks. Studies on traffic measurement of TCP networks have shown that the packet traffic exhibits long range dependent properties called self-similarity, which degrades the network performance greatly. The probabilistic fuzzy control （PFC） system is used to handle the complex stochastic features of self-similar traffic and the modeling uncertainties in the network system. A three-dimensional （3-D） membership function （MF） is embedded in the PFC to express and describe the stochastic feature of network traffic. The 3-D MF has extended the traditional fuzzy planar mapping and further provides a spatial mapping among ＂fuzziness-randomness-state＂. The additional stochastic expression of 3-D MF provides the PFC an additional freedom to handle the stochastic features of self-similar traffic. Simulation experiments show that the proposed control method achieves superior performance compared to traditional control schemes in a stochastic environment.
