ERN: Explicit rate notification AQM for TCP-IP networks

Active Queue Management (AQM) tries to find a balance between keeping high link utilization, minimizing queueing delays, so as not to introduce unnecessary end-to-end delays, and ensure a fair share of bandwidth between flows. Traditional AQM mechanisms have been built using only information that are present in routers, and it is quite understandable given the importance of the scaling-up property, which is quite fundamental to mechanisms governing the networks. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism called Explicit Rate Notification (ERN) to use in end-to-end nodes. The ERN scheme sends information about the sending rate and round trip time (RTT) of the flows. This new available information to the intermediate nodes (routers) is used to improve fairness, increase utilization, and minimizing queueing delays. Thus, it induces a better control of the queue. A comparison of our scheme with pre-existent schemes, like ECN, show the superiority of the proposed mechanism.