SF-FC: A Neighbor-State Based Flow Control with Soft Fairness

Many audio and video stream applications in the Internet require good network performance but not perfect reliability. Such applications should employ congestion control and should not shut down the TCP ows by restricting bu ering too much. However, the Internet is not a small local community, and it is impossible to rely on all developers to incorporate end-to-end congestion control in their Internet applications. The network should take part in controlling its own resource utilization. Most research for fair queuing tend to focus on reducing processing overhead and achieving exact fairness for each ow. In this paper we claim that perfect fair queuing is not e ective for end users in the current complicated network environment. We propose Soft Fair Flow Control(SF-FC) which is a light weight router mechanism that employs simple FIFO queuing, and shows high performance than other fair queuing. SF-FC provides fair network resource allocation to non-adaptive and adaptive ows. Each SFFC router informs the upstream SF-FC router of its link state. Based on the received state, SF-FC dynamically sets the packet discard rate of the non-adaptive ows.