A rate-based drop policy for punishing unresponsive flows

Abstract

This paper proposes a drop policy for punishing unresponsive flows. The proposed drop policy uses the difference in traffic arrival patterns of responsive and unresponsive flows, and discards more packets from unresponsive flows. The drop probability of an arriving packet at a router is determined only by the temporal arrival rate of the router at that time, and the router does not need to identify the flow to which the packet belongs. The main advantage of this policy is that it performs well even in the presence of a large number of unresponsive flows since it does not attempt to distinguish high-bandwidth flows. Extensive simulations are presented to show that the proposed policy effectively punishes unresponsive flows by dropping more packets from them in various network situations. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.