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 fur UDP sources. In this paper, to improve TCP fairness of the REDP marker, we combine a dropper 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. It performs a dropping in the demotion at a domain boundary only if there is no prior demotion. The concatenate dropping at multiple domains is avoided to manifest the effect of a dropping at a domain boundary on TCP fairness. We experiment with the REDP marker with the combined dropper using ns2 simulator for TCP sources. The simulation results show that the REDP marker with the combined dropper improves TCP fairness in demoting and promoting packets by generating fair demoted in-profile traffic compared to the REDP marker. The effectiveness of the selected drop probability is also investigated with showing its impact on the performance of the REDP marker with the combined dropper.
