A novel RED-Based hop-by-hop congestion control

With the rapid emergence of new services and quick changes of traffic in the Internet, the widely used end-to-end congestion control mechanism becomes insufficient. This paper presents a novel RED-based hop-by-hop congestion control mechanism which is based on the coordination of the routers and the hosts. No per-flow state information is maintained in the routers. The application itself need not take care of the rate adaptation. The mechanism provides a uniform solution accommodating both responsive and unresponsive traffic with trivial overhead. It reduces the packet loss to zero and leads to higher network resource utilization. Response time to congestion is greatly reduced. The mechanism has been implemented in the Linux kernel. Some preliminary experiments show its advantages.