Delivering faster congestion feedback with the mark-front strategy

Computer networks use congestion feedback from the routers and destinations to control the transmission load. Delivering timely congestion feedback is essential to the performance of networks. Reaction to the congestion can be more effective if faster feedback is provided. Current TCP/IP networks use timeout, duplicate ACKs and explicit congestion notification (ECN) to deliver congestion feedback; each provides a faster feedback than the previous method. In this paper, we propose a mark-front strategy that delivers an even faster congestion feedback. With analytical and simulation results, we show that mark-front strategy reduces buffer size requirement, improves link efficiency and provides better fairness among users