Preferential Bandwidth Allocation for Short Flows with Active Queue Management

Several fair queueing mechanisms based on stateless core (SCORE)/dynamic packet state (DPS) architecture have been proposed to address the scalability problem of stateful architectures. However, most of these mechanisms indiscriminatingly label every packet in edge routers while only a small fraction of the packets that come from fast flows will be dropped by core routers. Moreover, these mechanisms usually apply simple techniques to detect congestion, which makes them unable to control the queue length. In this paper, a new fair bandwidth allocation mechanism is proposed. In the new mechanism, edge routers only label the packets of long flows so that the bandwidth is preferentially allocated to short flows and the remaining is fairly allocated among the competing long flows. Furthermore, routers can keep the queue length at a reference value using active queue management (AQM) algorithm. The simulation results show that this mechanism performs well in many aspects.