SUMMARYCore-stateless mechanisms, such as core-stateless fair queuing (CSFQ), reduce the complexity of fair queuing, which usually need to maintain states, manage buffers, and perform flow scheduling on a per-flow basis. However, they require executing label rewriting and dropping decision on a per-packet basis, thus preventing them from being widely deployed. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture based on CSFQ without per-packet labelling. Similarly, we distinguish between edge routers and core routers. Edge routers maintain the per-flow state by employing a fair queuing mechanism to allocate each flow a fair bandwidth share locally and a token bucket mechanism to regulate those flows with feedback packets sent from egress edge routers. Core routers do not maintain per-flow state; they use FIFO packet scheduling extended by a fare rate alarm mechanism by estimating the arrival rate and the number of flows using a matching-mismatching algorithm. The novel scheme is called core-stateless fair rate estimation fair queuing (CSFREFQ). CSFREFQ is proven to be capable of achieving max-min fairness. Furthermore, we present and discuss simulations and experiments on the performance under different traffic scenarios.