Nonlinear Instabilities in TCP-RED

Abstract

With the growing size and popularity of the Internet, congestion control has emerged as an important problem. Poor management of congestion can render a network partly or fully inaccessible and significantly degrade the performance of networking applications. Researchers have proposed various approaches for addressing this issue. One approach is to keep the network simple and place most of the required intelligence at the end hosts by implementing a more sophisticated end-user rate control allocation [7]. Another approach is to control the congestion level at each router through Active Queue Management (AQM) mechanisms, e.g., Random Early Detection (RED) [11], Random Early Marking (REM) [3], and Virtual Queue (VQ) [12]. A common goal of these AQM mechanisms is to detect early signs of congestion and provide feedback to the adaptive sources so that congestion can be avoided without causing a significant degradation in network performance.