Abstract
To provide the end-to-end service differentiation for assured services, the random early demotion and promotion (REDP) marker in the edge router at each domain boundary monitors the aggregate flow of the incoming in-profile packets and demotes in-profile packets or promotes the previously demoted in-profile packets at the aggregate flow level according to the negotiated interdomain service level agreement (SLA). The REDP marker achieves UDP fairness in demoting and promoting packets through random and early marking decisions on packets. But, TCP fairness of the REDP marker is not obvious as for UDP sources. In this paper, to improve TCP fairness of the REDP marker, we propose a modified REDP marker where we combine a dropper, meters and a token filling rate configuration component with the REDP marker. To make packet transmission rates of TCP flows more fair, at the aggregate flow level the combined dropper drops incoming excessive in-profile packets randomly with a constant probability when the token level in the leaky bucket stays in demotion region without incoming demoted in-profile packets. Considering the case where the token level cannot stay in demotion region without the prior demotion, we propose a token filling rate configuration method using traffic meters. By using the token filling rate configuration method, the modified REDP marker newly configures a token filling rate which is less than the negotiated rate determined by interdomain SLA and larger than the current input aggregate in-profile traffic rate. Then, with the newly configured token filling rate, the token level in the modified REDP marker can stay in demotion region pertinently fir the operation of the dropper to improve TCP fairness. We experiment with the modified REDP marker using ns2 simulator fur TCP sources at the general case where the token level cannot stay in demotion region without the prior demotion at the negotiated rate set as the bottleneck link bandwidth. The simulation results demonstrate that through the combined dropper with the newly configured token filling rate, the modified REDP marker also increases both aggregate in-profile throughput and link utilization in addition to TCP fairness improvement compared to the REDP marker.
