Nonlinear RED: A simple yet efficient active queue management scheme

Abstract

Among various active queue management schemes (AQM), random early detection (RED) is probably the most extensively studied. Unlike the existing RED enhancement schemes, we replace the linear packet dropping function in RED by a judicially designed nonlinear quadratic function. The rest of the original RED remains unchanged. We call this new scheme Nonlinear RED, or NLRED. The underlying idea is that, with the proposed nonlinear packet dropping function, packet dropping becomes gentler than RED at light traffic load but more aggressive at heavy load. As a result, at light traffic load, NLRED encourages the router to operate in a range of average queue sizes rather than a fixed one. When the load is heavy and the average queue size approaches the pre-determined maximum threshold (i.e. the queue size may soon get out of control), NLRED allows more aggressive packet dropping to back off from it. Simulations demonstrate that NLRED achieves a higher and more stable throughput than RED and REM, another efficient variant of RED. Since NLRED is fully compatible with RED, we can easily upgrade/replace the existing RED implementations by NLRED.