Adding Randomness to Modeling Internet TCP-RED Systems With Interactive Gateways

Abstract

In Internet gateways with active queue management, effective algorithms are often used to enhance the traffic flows through the gateway. The random early detection (RED) algorithm is a widely used algorithm for controlling the transmission control protocol (TCP) flows. Specifically, the RED algorithm has deliberately introduced randomness into the explicit congestion notification (ECN) marking mechanism in order to enhance the fairness and to avoid synchronization of TCP flows through the gateway. As randomness plays a key role in providing better performance for RED gateways than the DropTail gateways, knowledge of the effect of the random mechanism is important to the understanding the behavior of the system. The fluid flow model (FFM), ignoring the randomness of ECN markings, has provided a fast alternative to the slow ns-2 network simulation tool in studying the TCP flow in the RED gateway. In this brief, the random ECN marking mechanism in RED gateways has been studied. The randomness of the RED ECN marking algorithm is implemented into the FFM. Verified using ns-2 simulations, the proposed model shows better dynamical performance than FFM in both the single-bottleneck dumbbell network and in networks with interactive bottlenecks.