Metering Re-ECN: Performance evaluation and its applicability in cellular networks

The Re-ECN protocol is a recently proposed congestion notification scheme for IP networks. Building upon Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN), which marks packets instead of dropping them during congestion, Re-ECN requires the end users to re-insert the marking information back to the network as a feedback to allow the network react more effectively on resource management. In this work, we first propose an infrastructure based deployment strategy by incorporating Re-ECN mechanisms into the GTP-U protocols in the cellular network without changing any end user terminals. We conduct simulation analysis of Re-ECN's performance in cellular network. We study the efficiency and fairness properties of Re-ECN in networks with a large number of short-lived and long-lived flows. A diverse set of network conditions is evaluated including different hops counts, variety of RTTs and loss rates. We further demonstrate its advantage by comparing with other congestion avoidance mechanisms.