<title>New active queue management mechanism for Web traffic</title>

Abstract

In this work, we devise and study the performance of a new active queue management mechanism for Web traffic to more intelligently select packets to drop incipient of network congestion. The proposed mechanism specifically targets short-lived or fragile flows (e.g., most HTTP flows) to keep link utilization high while reducing the HTTP response time. The goal of the proposed active queue management scheme is to protect new TCP flows and TCP flows that have packet dropped recently from potential network congestion, thus achieving better response times. Our simulation studies have compared the performance of RED and the proposed AQM for a network with only HTTP traffic at loads less, close to, and more than the network capacity. Simulations show that a subsidy given to a flow that that is in its initial stage provides significantly better performance in terms of HTTP request-reply delays without sacrificing the link utilization. The new scheme is very simple to implement. It contains one additional control parameter to RED, and the tuning of this parameter is simple. Since most HTTP flows are short-lived, only the state information for a subset of active flows needs to be maintained for a very short period of time, and then all the resources used for keeping the state information can be reclaimed.