A New Class-Based Traffic Queue Management Algorithm in the Internet

Facing limited network resources such as bandwidth and processing capability, the Internet will have congestion from time to time. In this paper, we propose a scheme to maximize the total utility offered by the network to the end user during congested times. We believe the only way to achieve our goal is to make the scheme application-aware, that is, to take advantage of the characteristics of the application. To make our scheme scalable, it is designed to be class-based. Traffic from applications with similar characteristics is classified into the same class. We adopted the RED queue management mechanism to adaptively control the traffic belonging to the same class. To achieve the optimal utility, the traffic belonging to different classes should be controlled differently. By adjusting link bandwidth assignments of different classes, the scheme can achieve the goal and adapt to the changes of dynamical incoming traffic. We use the control theoretical approach to analyze our scheme. In this paper, we focus on optimizing the control on two types of traffic flows: TCP and Simple UDP (SUDP, modeling audio or video applications based on UDP). We derive the differential equations to model the dynamics of SUDP traffic flows and drive stability conditions for the system with both SUDP and TCP traffic flows. In our study, we also find analytical results on the TCP traffic stable point are not accurate, so we derived new formulas on the TCP traffic stable point. We verified the proposed scheme with extensive NS2 simulations.