Ensuring fairness among ECN and non-ECN TCP over the internet

ABSTRACT

Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) has been proved to provide a fast indication of incipient congestion and thus better the performance of a TCP/IP network. In this work, we carry out investigations on gateway or router performance in providing fairnesss when both FIM ECN-capable and non-ECN-capable connections are employed. We propose a new packet-dropping scheme called Fair In-time Dropping (FID) which drops packets from a connection upon detecting an incipient indication of congestion depending on its share of gateway or router buffer occupancy. We also show that a combination of FIM and FID offers the best fairness compared with a combination of FIM along with other dropping schemes.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.2 Network Protocols
          Subjects: Routing protocols

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.2 Network Protocols

          Nouns: TCP/IP

General Terms:
Algorithms, Performance