CAM02-1: Time-Driven Early Discard (TED) to Improve the Fairness of TCP Congestion Control

This paper proposes a novel adaptive AQM (advanced queue management) approach called Time-Driven Early Discard (TED). The basic underlying idea is to set a deadline on packet service time in routers, beyond which packets are discarded. TED is shown to improve fairness among TCP connections sharing congested links when the deadline is chosen proportional to their round trip time (RTT). TED is adaptive in limiting the throughput of only those connections that traverse congested links. In fact, as demonstrated by the presented results, TCP connections traversing parts of the network with enough available capacity can achieve the maximum throughput enabled by their transmission window as corresponding packets do not reach their deadline . Finally, the paper shows how TED can be instrumental in enabling TCP to deploy shorter retransmission timeouts, which results in prompter reactivity to loss, hence improved performance overall in terms of achieved goodput.