Fast convergence to network fairness
Journal of Systems and Software
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The increasing deployment of unresponsive traffic can cause serious problems on the Internet. By unresponsive traffic, we mean flows that do not reduce their sending rate in response to congestion. The problems include unfairness against competing traffic that employ congestion control and even congestion collapse. In this thesis work, we propose router mechanisms to regulate unresponsive best-effort traffic. The goal of the proposed mechanisms is to drop undeliverable packets - packets that are dropped somewhere in the network before they reach their destination - as close to the periphery of the network as possible. The key ideas of our approach are: (1) edge routers keep track of incoming flows and their arrival rates; (2) core routers use RED (Random Early Detection) for queue management and generate rate-limited source quenches on packet drops to advice sources to reduce their sending rates; and (3) edge routers snoop on source quenches passing through them and use them to control per-flow regulators. Regulators adjust their maximum sending rate using a multiplicative-decrease, additive-increase discipline. A decrease is triggered by the arrival of a source quench; an increase is triggered for every estimated round-trip time period. We examine the impact of these mechanisms for a variety of simulated network topologies and traffic patterns.