Improving fairness of RED aided by lightweight flow information

RED is the only active queue management mechanism recommended by IETF. Though RED is successful in network congestion control and link utilization enhancement, it suffers from two problems, the stability and the fairness. The fairness problem means 1) RED has little affects on unresponsive flows in congestion control - the UDP flow for example; 2) responsive flows with different packet size or round trip time (RTT) share the bandwidth of the bottleneck link unfairly when congestion occurs. An enhanced version RED, LwFRED, which improves the fairness of RED aided by light-weight flow information, is proposed. Extensive simulations by NS2 demonstrate that the LwFRED could improve Web flows' performance while discipline misbehaving flows efficiently. Though LwFRED is flow based, its scalability is acceptable.