An Architecture for Network Congestion Control and Charging of Non-cooperative Traffic

This paper proposes an architecture capable of reducing network congestion caused by the intense use of non-cooperative traffic. A charging scheme is imposed to all traffic that is carried over the UDP protocol (non-cooperative) given its intrinsic priority over TCP. Prices are calculated according to the degree of starvation undergone by cooperative TCP flows. When TCP flows experience a low performance, charges are high for non-cooperative flows and so the architecture tends to block new incoming UDP traffic. Knowledge about flows status is obtained through the use of flow protocol technology. Resources are reserved using firewall rules and custom-queueing mechanisms. An implementation of the architecture is made and tests show the effectiveness of our proposal in a real network scenario.