Design of Active Queue Management for Robust Control on Access Router for Heterogeneous Networks

Abstract

The Internet architecture is a packet switching technology that allows dynamic sharing of bandwidth among different flows with in an IP network. Packets are stored and forwarded from one node to the next until reaching their destination. Major issues in this integration are congestion control and how to meet different quality of service requirements associated with various services. In other words streaming media quality degrades with increased packet delay and jitter caused by network congestion. To mitigate the impact of network congestion, various techniques have been used to improve multimedia quality and one of those techniques is Active Queue Management (AQM). Access routers require a buffer to hold packets during times of congestion. A large buffer can absorb the bursty arrivals, and this tends to increase the link utilizations but results in higher queuing delays. Traffic burstiness has a considerable negative impact on network performance. AQM is now considered an effective congestion control mechanism for enhancing transport protocol performance over wireless links. In order to have good link utilization, it is necessary for queues to adapt to varying traffic loads. This paper considers a particular scheme which is called Adaptive AQM (AAQM) and studies its performance in the presence of feedback delays and its ability to maintain a small queue length as well as its robustness in the presence of traffic burstiness. The paper also presents a method based on the well-known Markov Modulated Poisson Process (MPP) to capture traffic burstiness and buffer occupancy. To demonstrate the generality of the presented method, an analytic model is described and verified by extensive simulations of different adaptive AQM algorithms. The analysis and simulations show that AAQM outperforms the other AQMs with respect to responsiveness and robustness.