An Adaptive Drop Marker for Edge Routers in DiffServ Networks

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 (ASs) 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. The TPR is set larger than the current input IN packet rate of aggregate TCP flows while inversely proportional to the measured input OUT packet rate. 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, the ARD marker performs random early fair remarking of their excessive IN packets to OUT packets at the aggregate flow level according to the TPR. In addition, an aggregate dropper is combined to drop some excessive IN packets fairly and constantly according to the TPR. 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.