On the use of a full information feedback to stabilize RED

Abstract

RED and most of its family algorithms use only the average queue length as a congestion meter. Since the average queue length considers only long-term behavior of the queue, these algorithms fail to see instantaneous changes of the queue length and hence their reaction to the congestion is not fast enough. In other words the feedback generated by using only the average queue length does not reflect the network congestion precisely and hence leads to a poor performance and stability. This paper solves this problem by designing a RED-based active queue management (AQM) algorithm, called FUF-RED that provides a Full Information Feedback. This algorithm not only considers the average queue length but also it takes into account growth rate of the instantaneous queue length to calculate its congestion feedback. The proposed algorithm is supported by a theoretical stability analysis which gives those feedback gains that guarantees the network stability. Extensive packet level simulations, done by using ns-2 simulator, show that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing AQM algorithms in terms of stability, average queue length, number of dropped packets and bottleneck utilization.