Anti-windup compensator for active queue management in TCP networks

Abstract

In this paper, we apply a dynamic anti-windup scheme for improving the performance of a conventional proportional–integral (PI) controller for active queue management (AQM) supporting TCP flows. When a PI controller is used for AQM, the windup phenomenon of the integral action can cause performance degradation because the packet drop probability is limited between 0 and 1. Therefore we suggest a TCP/AQM model with a saturating actuator and apply a dynamic anti-windup method for improving the performance of the conventional PI AQM scheme. The proposed scheme not only provides graceful performance degradation, but also guarantees the stability of the overall system with the linearized TCP model. We verify the performance of the proposed scheme through ns-2 simulations. The simulation results show that our scheme outperforms the conventional PI controller when the traffic load is not stationary, which is always the case in real network environment.