SWFA: a new buffer management mechanism for TCP over ATM-GFR

We investigate packet discarding schemes for transport control protocol (TCP) over asynchronous transfer mode with guaranteed frame rate service. In this letter, we propose the selective weighted fair allocation (SWFA) scheme, which discards packets from selected sessions. 15 TCP connections with equal minimum cell rate (MCR) and unequal MCRs are simulated. The SWFA scheme with per-virtual connection (VC) queuing is compared with early packet discard (EPD) with first-in, first-out queuing, EPD with per-VC queuing, and differential fair buffer allocation with per-VC queuing. Our results show that SWFA with per-VC queuing achieves significant enhancement on throughputs, goodputs, and fairness.