Dynamic arbitration of video conferencing flows by using MXQ mechanism

This paper discusses potential congestion problems caused by video conferencing applications. These applications commonly use UDP for their video and audio transmission. Unlike TCP, UDP does not have any standardized mechanisms for congestion control. Therefore, they might lead to severe congestion that would significantly degrade network utilization. To overcome this problem, we introduce a new flow-aware forwarding policy to enable dynamic arbitration control of UDP flows, and propose the MXQ (MaXimal Queuing) mechanism to realize the policy. A number of experiments were conducted by using a prototype to establish video conferencing applications. They include the large-scale trans-Pacific field trial conducted at the Fall 2002 Internet2 Member Meeting. The results show that the dynamic arbitration control realized by the MXQ mechanism can effectively control the congestion and enhance the effective use of best-effort networks.