Deterministic packet marking for max-min flow control

Abstract

This letter proposes a deterministic packet marking scheme that estimates the maximum link price on a communication path. The proposed scheme is simple and IP-compatible because it uses two-bit explicit congestion notification (ECN) field and IP identification (IPid) field in the standard IP header for the estimation. Through simulations using real IP packet traces, we show that our scheme indeed works as designed with small estimation errors, and thus enables existing max-min flow control algorithms to serve their purpose without the need of separate out-of-band control packets to carry link prices.