A scalable router mechanism for load adaptive fair packet dropping

The need for simple, scalable, and incrementally deployable router-level mechanisms to support end-to-end congestion control has been well recognized in the literature. Specifically, mechanisms for early congestion detection and fair packet dropping, such as RED, have been proposed and extensively studied. It has been shown that RED does not scale well with the number of flows, is difficult to tune dynamically, and can degenerate into tail dropping behavior under a variety of conditions. To address these problems while still retaining the robust and simple of RED, we propose a new mechanism called load adaptive fair drop (LAFD), that has no tunable parameters, and adapts effectively to the offered load and the number of flows without maintaining any pre-flow state