Simulation of a Bandwidth Threshold-Based Packet Discarding Algorithm for Internet Routers

During network congestion, Internet routers discard or accept packets without any regard to the impact the discarded packets might have on the applications or the level of usefulness accepted packets might bring to the applications. Such indiscriminate packet discarding leads to less than desirable performance for the network and the network applications, especially when both multimedia and data communication applications share the same networking resources. The authors have previously proposed a bandwidth threshold based packet discarding algorithm which, instead of accepting packets at any rate during congestion, discards packets based on a minimum bandwidth threshold. If the router is unable to meet the minimum bandwidth requirement of an application, all packets from the application are dropped until more bandwidth is available. This paper presents simulation results of the bandwidth threshold based packet discarding algorithm. The results confirm the earlier claims that the proposed algorithm can eliminate "useless" packet forwarding for multimedia applications during congestion and improve the performance of data communication applications.