A fair scalable inter-domain TCP marker for multiple domain DiffServ networks

Abstract

The differentiated services (DiffServ) is proposed to provide packet level service differentiations in a scalable manner. To provide an end-to-end service differentiation to users having a connection over multiple domains, as well as a flow marker, an intermediate marker is necessary at the edge routers, and it should not be operated at a flow level due to a scalability problem. Due to this operation requirement, the intermediate marker has a fairness problem among the transmission control protocol (TCP) flows since TCP flows have intrinsically unfair throughputs due to the TCP's congestion control algorithm. Moreover, it is very difficult to resolve this problem without individual flow state information such as round trip time (RTT) and sending rate of each flow. In this paper, to resolve this TCP fairness problem of an intermediate marker, we propose a fair scalable marker (FSM) as an intermediate marker which works with a source flow three color marker (sf-TCM) operating as a host source marker. The proposed fair scalable marker improves the fairness among the TCP flows with different RTTs without per-flow management. Through the simulations, we show that the FSM can improve TCP fairness as well as link utilization in multiple domain DiffServ networks.