PAQM: an adaptive and proactive queue management for end‐to‐end TCP congestion control

Abstract

AbstractTwo functions, the congestion indicator (i.e. how to detect congestion) and the congestion control function (i.e. how to avoid and control congestion), are used at a router to support end‐to‐end congestion control in the Internet. Random early detection (RED) (IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking 1993; 1(4):397–413) enhanced the two functions by introducing queue length averaging and probabilistic early packet dropping. In particular, RED uses an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) queue length not only to detect incipient congestion but also to smooth the bursty incoming traffic and its resulting transient congestion. Following RED, many active queue management (AQM)‐based extensions have been proposed. However, many AQM proposals have shown severe problems with detection and control of the incipient congestion adaptively to the dynamically changing network situations. In this paper, we introduce and analyse a feedback control model of TCP/AQM dynamics. Then, we propose the Pro‐active Queue Management (PAQM) mechanism, which is able to provide proactive congestion avoidance and control using an adaptive congestion indicator and a control function under a wide range of traffic environments. The PAQM stabilizes the queue length around the desired level while giving smooth and low packet loss rates and high network resource utilization. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.