A low-state packet marking framework for approximate fair bandwidth allocation

Misbehaving, non-congestion-reactive traffic is on the rise in the Internet. One way to control misbehaving traffic is to enforce local fairness among flows. Locally fair policies, such as fair-queueing and other fair AQM schemes, are inadequate to simultaneously control misbehaving traffic and provide high network utilization. We thus need to enforce globally fair bandwidth allocations. However, such schemes have typically been stateful and complex to implement and deploy. In this letter, we present a low state, lightweight scheme based on stateless fair packet marking at network edges followed by RIO queueing at core nodes, to control misbehaving flows with more efficient utilization of network bandwidth. Additionally, with low-state feedback from bottleneck routers, we show that, in practice, we can approximate global max-min fairness within an island of routers. We show, using simulations, that we can indeed control misbehaving flows and provide more globally fair bandwidth allocation.