Queue Stability Analysis and Performance Evaluation of a TCP-Compliant Window Management Mechanism

Addressing performance degradations in end-to-end congestion control has been one of the most active research areas in the last decade. A huge number of techniques have been proposed in the past, but some of them miss the challenging target of both minimizing network delay and keeping goodput close to the network capacity (e.g., active queue management (AQM) techniques); others require changes in both network routers and hosts that make them difficult to deploy [e.g., eXplicit Control Protocol (XCP)]. In a previous paper, a novel mechanism, called Active Window Management (AWM), has been proposed by the same authors with the aim of controlling the queue length in network routers, maintaining it almost constant to achieve no loss, while maximizing network utilization. The target of this paper is twofold: 1) carrying out a deep analysis of the AWM algorithm stability to evaluate the impact of some system parameters on the performance of the whole system; 2) demonstrating that AWM can be gradually introduced, maintaining the compatibility with the current Internet. An extensive numerical analysis is proposed to demonstrate that AWM stabilizes the queue around a target value with small oscillations.