A Lightweight Fairness-Driven AQM for Regulating Bandwidth Utilization in Best-Effort Routers

The end-to-end congestion control mechanism of transmission control protocol (TCP) is critical to the robustness and fairness of the best-effort Internet. Since it is no longer practical to rely on end-systems to cooperatively deploy congestion control mechanisms, the network itself must now participate in regulating its own resource utilization. To that end, fairness-driven active queue management (AQM) is promising in sharing the scarce bandwidth among competing flows in a fair manner. However, most of the existing fairness-driven AQM schemes cannot provide efficient and fair bandwidth allocation while being scalable. This paper presents a novel fairness-driven AQM scheme, called CHORD (CHOKe with recent drop history) that seeks to maximize fair bandwidth sharing among aggregate flows while retaining the scalability in terms of the minimum possible state space and per-packet processing costs. Fairness is enforced by identifying and restricting high-bandwidth unresponsive flows at the time of congestion with a lightweight control function. The identification mechanism consists of a fixed-size cache to capture the history of recent drops with a state space equal to the size of the cache. The restriction mechanism is stateless with two matching trial phases and an adaptive drawing factor to take a strong punitive measure against the identified high-bandwidth unresponsive flows in proportion to the average buffer occupancy. Comprehensive performance evaluation indicates that among other well-known AQM schemes of comparable complexities, CHORD provides enhanced TCP goodput and intra-protocol fairness and is well-suited for fair bandwidth allocation to aggregate traffic across a wide range of packet and buffer sizes at a bottleneck router.