Fairness-Driven Queue Management: A Survey and Taxonomy

Abstract

Providing congestion control in the Internet, while ensuring fairness among myriad of heterogeneous flows is a challenging task. The conventional wisdom is to rely on end-user applications cooperatively deploying congestion control mechanisms to achieve high network utilization and some degree of fairness among flows. However, as the Internet has evolved to encompass all of society, such a cooperative behavior from enduser applications is not always granted. Applications may simply act selfishly to be more competitive through bandwidth abuse. Bandwidth starvation may also arise unintentionally depending on the nature of traffic sources. The ensuing impact can be severe fairness hazard and even congestion collapse. Router-based queue management schemes driven by fairness objectives thus become an inescapable necessity for fairly sharing network resources.Given a significant volume of literature relating to fairnessdriven queue management schemes, there has remained a need for a broader and coherent survey. This paper presents a systematic and comprehensive review of eminent fairness-driven queue management schemes from the inception of the concept and the preliminary work to the most recent work. We present a new taxonomy of categorizing fairness-driven queue management schemes. We discuss design approaches and key attributes of these schemes and provide their comparison and analysis. Based on the outcomes of this survey, we discuss a number of open issues and provide generic design guidelines and future directions for the research in this field. Fairness-Driven Queue Management: A Survey and Taxonomy 2 c packets/s Scheduling algorithm Dequeueend B packets Buffer k l 1 l Enqueueend Output link Input links Queue management algorithm mechanisms at all, either deliberately or by accident, and generate misbehaving traffic [9]. Furthermore, there are applications that selfishly improve throughput by splitting a single TCP connection into multiple connections [10], [3]. All such applications and the resulting traffic aggregates are potentially dangerous as they inflict unfairness in the network, and can eventually cause congestion collapse [9], [11].In response to these problems, there has been a long history, dating back to [12], of realizing that routers play a significant role in fair bandwidth allocation. The technical report by Floyd and Fall [13] (later published as [3]) is, however, the first one to extensively demonstrate the danger of unfairness due to unresponsive flows. Floyd and Fall [13] argue that the incentives for cooperative behavior can only come from the network itself, and therefore, routers inevitably need to deploy mechanisms to provide an incentive structure for applications to use end-to-end congestion control. The report also proposes queue management based techniques for identifying and restricting unresponsive flows. Since then, a number of fairness-driven queue management schemes have been proposed to shield responsive flows and to regulate unresponsive and aggressive flows.This paper provid...

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