Enhancing application throughput by selective packet dropping

Selective packet dropping policies have been used to reduce congestion and transmission of traffic that would inevitably be retransmitted in ATM networks. Common dropping policies proposed are drop-tail, partial packet discard (PPD), early packet discard (EPD) and their recent variations. However, depending on various circumstances, particularly in multi-hop networking environments, application throughput may be quite poor and newer schemes are necessary. In this paper, we first study the performance of existing dropping schemes and identify their shortcomings. Then we propose a new dropping policy called preemptive PPD (pPPD) that exhibits superior performance