An enhanced router based queuing policy providing better fairness to real-time data transfers in Internet

Abstract

Forwarding and delivery in IP based internet is a best effort service. IP being a connectionless forwarding mechanism, it may drop the packets at the time of congestion. This may affect the services in internet as it is not able to deliver the packet with sufficient Quality of service (QOS).The reliability mechanism adopted by a TCP source may be successful in delivering the packet ultimately but the traffic running on UDP gets severely affected by congestion. The real-time applications running over UDP fail to meet their QOS deadlines on throughput delay and jitter. The queue management mechanisms precisely the scheduling and dropping policies should be capable of promoting real-time transfers to a fair extend without affecting the non-real-time transfers. Active queue management policies like RED based policies try to bring general fairness by allocating bandwidth fairly to all the flows. But, even such schemes cannot provide a fair treatment to real-time flows which send small sized packets at regular intervals .The paper analyses the AQM mechanisms and its ability to promote real-time data transfers. The paper also proposes a new dropping policy fairRED which is inspired from RED but show better fairness in dropping packets, ultimately promoting the real-time data transfers.