Towards automatic fairness for IP network applications

• Main Author: Aldabbagh, G. A.
• Published: University College London (University of London) 2011
• Subjects: 621.3
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.625554

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) carries the majority of today’s Internet traffic due to the success of the responsive congestion control mechanisms. However, the number of streaming media applications has grown tremendously during the past several years. Such applications do not use the TCP protocol, this implies that they rarely provide end-to-end congestion control (i.e. they are unresponsive) in a TCP-friendly manner and that they do not share the available bandwidth fairly with applications built on TCP. Additionally, it has been observed that short-lived flows (SLF) are at a disadvantage when competing against long-lived flows (LLF). This dissertation presents the fair bandwidth allocation architectural framework to provide fair allocation of network resources for competing flows traversing the network. The major contribution of this work is the design and implementation of a router-based Active Queue Management (AQM) scheme, Fair Early Drop (FED) which provides fair distribution of network bandwidth amongst competing responsive and unresponsive flows and LLFs and SLFs. A traffic classification module is also developed to identify LLFs from SLFs to enable FED to preferentially treat SLFs over LLF. SLFs are allowed to pass through the network without dropping any packets from them.