Experimental evaluation of the effect of queue management schemes on the performance of high speed TCPs in 10Gbps network environment

Abstract

Queue management schemes at the routers and congestion avoidance schemes at the end points cooperate to provide good congestion solutions in computer networks. While queue management schemes are still being developed, research on congestion avoidance has come a long way to serve the bandwidth requirement of the networks (e.g. high speed networks, data centers, etc.) at the order of 10Gbps. Because of considerable lack on the evaluation research work, there is no consensus on the choice of the queue management algorithms over these networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that presents experimental evaluation of the effect of various queue management schemes on high speed TCP variants in realistic 10Gbps network environment. Evaluation of queue management schemes such as Drop-tail, RED, CHOKe, and SFB are presented for popular high speed TCP variants such as TCP-RENO, HSTCP, and CUBIC over CRON [1], a real 10Gbps high speed network testbed. Performance results are presented for several important metrics of interests such as link utilization, fairness, delay, packet drop rate, and computational complexity. The presented work supports further research work on the design and deployment issues of queue management schemes for high speed networks.