Light-Weight Control of Non-responsive Traffic with Low Buffer Requirements

We propose ESREQM (Efficient Sending Rate Estimation Queue Management), a novel active queue management scheme that achieves almost perfect max-min fairness among flows with minimum (constant) per-flow state and a constant number of CPU operations to handle an incoming packet using a single queue with very low buffer requirements. ESREQM estimates sending rates of flows through a history discounting process that allows it to guarantee max-min fairness by automatically adapting parameters. It can also be used to punish non-responsive flows. The per-flow state is limited to a single value per flow, which allows the flow memory to be in SRAM, thereby making packet processing scalable with link speeds. ESREQM results in good link utilization with low buffer size requirements because it provably desynchronizes TCP flows as a by-product. We show our results through a mixture of analysis and simulation. Our scheme does not make assumptions on what transport protocols are used.