A queue management algorithm for fair bandwidth allocation

Abstract

In this paper, a stateless active queue management algorithm called “PUNSI” which aims to achieve fair bandwidth allocation in congested routers is proposed. This algorithm prevents unresponsive flows from dominating available bandwidth shared with responsive flows by penalizing packets from unresponsive flows with a higher probability than those from responsive flows. It is motivated by the observation that unresponsive flows tend to generate traffic of higher rates than responsive ones and that, when a packet is dropped due to buffer overflow, fellow packets from the same flow seem to be found in the buffer among those having joined recently. Simulation experiments show that the algorithm discards packets from unresponsive flows effectively and achieves pretty good fair share among flows with low implementation complexity.