The effects of active queue management on web performance

  • Authors:

  • Long Le;Jay Aikat;Kevin Jeffay;F. Donelson Smith

  • Affiliations:

  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill;University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill;University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill;University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

We present an empirical study of the effects of active queue management (AQM) on the distribution of response times experienced by a population of web users. Three prominent AQM schemes are considered: the Proportional Integrator (PI) controller, the Random Exponential Marking (REM) controller, and Adaptive Random Early Detection (ARED). The effects of these AQM schemes were studied alone and in combination with Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN). Our major results are: For offered loads up to 80% of bottleneck link capacity, no AQM scheme provides better response times than simple drop-tail FIFO queue management. For loads of 90% of link capacity or greater when ECN is not used, PI results in a modest improvement over drop-tail and the other AQM schemes. With ECN, both PI and REM provide significant response time improvement at offered loads above 90% of link capacity. Moreover, at a load of 90% PI and REM with ECN provide response times competitive to that achieved on an unloaded network. ARED with recommended parameter settings consistently resulted in the poorest response times which was unimproved by the addition of ECN.