Active Queue Management in MANETs - A Primer on Network Performance optimization

The need of congestion control and Queue management is inevitable in MANETs, and in order to perform research in this domain, a review of Active Queue Management Techniques with some important network parameters is presented. A framework could be devised so that we can generate scenario for various network configurations. The Networks are becoming increasing complicated in terms of the network traffic that they carry. Nowadays networks carry multimedia, voice, secured encrypted data along with the simple data they used to carry earlier. The heterogeneous nature of the networks can sometimes create problem in the traffic management on the backbone links. The multimedia traffic mostly flows on UDP and traffic like HTTPS flows on TCP. In order to analyze the traffic management, we must understand the behavior of various Active Queue Management Techniques on different traffic classes viz TCP and UDP. In this thesis, a multi class network was analyzed for both TCP and UDP traffic classes for various network performance parameters like Throughput, Packet loss ratio and Average end to end delay for various networks Active Queue Management Techniques. In the thesis four Active Management Techniques were tested for both TCP and UDP traffic classes. In UDP traffic flow the fragment size of the packets generated at the source was also varied for varied network parameters like bandwidth, delay and channel error rate. The analysis tries to find out the best and optimum AQM technique for different classes of traffic under various conditions and the results can be used to carefully design the network on requirement basis. In case of TCP it has been observed SFQ was intended to perform best in as it employs Fair Queuing Algorithms for the handling of flow of packets on link with simultaneous sessions. On the other hand in UDP Drop tail, RED and REM performed best in different scenarios as their Queue management involves only the link state and the congestion and not on the traffic flow.