A general weighted fair discard algorithm for congestion control

The selective data discard mechanism is widely used for network congestion control. It is also crucial for networks to guarantee QoS. In this paper, we propose a general discard discipline in terms of weighted fair discard (WFD). It consists of two parts, the discard weight defined by users, and the discard mechanism for dropping data according to the connections' discard weights. We also prove some interesting attributes of this algorithm. It is observed that relative data loss can be estimated and controlled in advance, which is very useful for multimedia services. Meanwhile, since the weights assigned to each connection can be flexibly adjusted, it is concluded that adaptive applications can optimize their performance by the WFD as compared with other discard disciplines, such as drop tail.