Towards the Fairness of Traffic Policer

Abstract

Traffic policing is widely used by ISPs to limit their customers’ traffic rates. It has long been believed that a well-tuned traffic policer offers a satisfactory performance for TCP. However, we find this belief breaks with the emergence of new congestion control (CC) algorithms like BBR: flows using these new CC algorithms can easily occupy the majority of the bandwidth, starving traditional TCP flows. We confirm this problem with experiments and reveal its root cause as follows. Without buffer in traffic policers, congestion only causes packet losses, while new CC algorithms are loss-resilient, i.e. they adjust the sending rate based on other network feedback like delay. Thus, when being policed they will not reduce the sending rate until an unacceptable loss ratio for TCP is reached, resulting in low throughput for TCP. Simply adding buffer to the traffic policer improves fairness but incurs high latency. To this end, we propose FairPolicer, which can achieve fair bandwidth allocation without sacrificing latency. FairPolicer regards token as a basic unit of bandwidth and fairly allocates tokens to active flows in a round-robin manner. Testbed experiments show that FairPolicer can significantly improve the fairness and achieve much lower latency than other kinds of rate-limiters.