The Internet, traditionally FTP, e-mail and Web traffic, is increasingly supporting emerging applications such as IP telephony, video conferencing and online games. These new genres of applications have different requirements in terms of throughput and delay than traditional applications. For example, interactive multimedia applications, unlike traditional applications, have more stringent delay constraints and less stringent loss constraints. Unfortunately, the current Internet offers a monolithic best-effort service to all applications without considering their specific requirements. Adaptive RED (ARED) is an Active Queue Management (AQM) technique, which optimizes the router for throughput. Throughput optimization provides acceptable QoS for traditional throughput sensitive applications, but is unfair for these new delay sensitive applications. While previous work has used different classes of QoS at the router to accommodate applications with varying requirements, thus far all have provided just 2 or 3 classes of service for applications to choose from. We propose two AQM mechanisms to optimize router for better overall QoS. Our first mechanism, RED-Worcester, is a simple extension to ARED in order to tune ARED for better average QoS support. Our second mechanism, RED-Boston, further extends RED-Worcester to improve the QoS for all flows. Unlike earlier approaches, we do not predefine classes of service, but instead provide a continuum from which applications can choose. We evaluate our approach using NS-2 and present results showing the amount of improvement in QoS achieved by our mechanisms over ARED.
See also:
Vishal Phirke, Mark Claypool, and Robert Kinicki. RED-Worcester - Traffic Sensitive Active Queue Management, Technical Report WPI-CS-TR-02-21, Computer Science Department, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, May 2002. Online at: ftp://ftp.cs.wpi.edu/pub/techreports/pdf/02-21.pdf
Vishal Phirke, Mark Claypool, and Robert Kinicki. RED-Worcester - Traffic Sensitive Active Queue Management, Poster at the 10th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, Paris, France, November 2002. Online at: /~claypool/ms/tsr/icnp-poster.ps