Differentiated Ethernet Congestion Management for Prioritized Traffic

This paper proposes and studies a differentiated congestion control for Ethernet congestion management. Following the popular approach that uses a cooperation of an Additive Increase and Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) based rate limiter and Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) active queue management to combat the congestion in Ethernet, the proposal considers differentiated AIMD settings for rate limiters to achieve congestion control differentiation for traffic of different priorities. We illustrate that while the operation of AIMD and ECN are independent, by using different AIMD settings, we can achieve differentiated control of bandwidth utilization. We provide an analysis and its numerical results showing the effectiveness of this method. Our proposed method is also implemented in OMNET++ simulator with results showing the effectiveness of bandwidth ratio differentiation.