Active Queue Management: A Survey

Since its formal introduction to IP networks in 1993 as a viable complementary approach for congestion control, there has been a steady stream of research output with respect to Active Queue Management (AQM). This survey attempts to travel the trajectory of AQM research from 1993 with the first algorithm, Random Early Detection (RED), to current work in 2011. In this survey we discuss the general attributes of AQM schemes, and the design approaches taken such as heuristic, control-theoretic and deterministic optimization. Of interest is the role of AQM in QoS provisioning particularly in the DiffServ context, as well as the role of AQM in the wireless domain. For each section, example algorithms from the research literature are presented.