Abstract
The differentiated services(DiffServ) architecture provides packet level service differentiation through the simple and predefined Per-Hop Behaviors(PHBs). The Assured Forwarding(AF) PHB proposed as the assured services uses the RED-in/out(RIO) approach to ensusre the expected capacity specified by the service profile. However, the AF PHB fails to give good QoS and fairness to the TCP flows. This is because OUT(out- of-profile) packet droppings at the RIO buffer are unfair and sporadic during only network congestion while the TCP's congestion control algorithm works with a different round trip time(RTT). In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Regulating Drop(ARD) marker, as a novel dropping strategy at the ingressive edge router, to improve TCP fairness in assured services without a decrease in the link utilization. To drop packets pertinently, the ARD marker adaptively changes a Temporary Permitted Rate(TPR) for aggregate TCP flows. To reduce the excessive use of greedy TCP flows by notifying droppings of their IN packets constantly to them without a decrease in the link utilization, according to the TPR, the ARD marker performs random early fair remarking and dropping of their excessive IN packets at the aggregate flow level. Thus, the throughput of a TCP flow no more depends on only the sporadic and unfair OUT packet droppings at the RIO buffer in the core router. Then, the ARD marker regulates the packet transmission rate of each TCP flow to the contract rate by increasing TCP fairness, without a decrease in the link utilization.
