Improving the performance of active buffer management with per-flow information

This letter proposes a new technique to improve the performance of active queue management (AQM) with per-flow information such as balanced random early detection (BRED). The technique is virtual buffer occupancy, which represents not the actual buffer occupancy but the buffer occupancy as it would be if packets were serviced in a fair round robin fashion. In AQM using virtual buffer occupancy, packets of flow i are dropped based on the virtual buffer occupancy of flow i. We show that BRED using virtual buffer occupancy achieves fairer bandwidth allocation than original BRED.