Enforcing fairness with explicit network feedback in the Internet

Fairness in the Internet is becoming a major obstacle for the introduction of commercial services. In this paper we address the problem of fairness with a slightly non-standard approach: we show that, in order to achieve fairness in the Internet, it is enough to provide good congestion control, without the need for explicit computation of fairness indexes. We first introduce a TCP-based congestion scheme that takes into account available bandwidth resources on links, describing how this scheme can be easily introduced as a TCP option in end-systems; it requires neither a centralized approach in routers, nor a per-flow management of traffic. Then several scenarios are analyzed via simulation, showing how and to what degree fairness is achieved. Results are compared with a traditional TCP-Reno implementation with RED routers. Finally, the coexistence of the new TCP version with traditional implementations is discussed.